Still Standing

Please Help Send Me to Taiwan!

2011-11-21T10:04:00.001-05:00

If you know me or have read this blog for even a few days, you've probably noticed my passion for China.

This love was first stirred up during four trips to the Middle Country in college. Each was a unique adventure, whether traversing the dusty deserts of Xinjiang province or teaching English in remote villages in tropical Yunnan. But for me, one common thread made them all a joy: Brad Kinney.

Brad is one of my best friends. Throughout our time at the University of Georgia, we had some crazy experiences in Asia and Central America - facing repeated interrogation by Chinese border guards and hiking across a former Panamanian prison island in the Pacific, to name a few. We also had a few quirky schemes here at home, including a (successful) quest to win free flights by diving in Wendy's dumpsters.

Now, we have a chance to return to East Asia as a team for the first time since graduation. But we can't do it alone. We're not asking for money; we simply want one minute of your time for each of the next 10 days.

Here's the deal: We've entered a photo contest in which the top three vote-getters on a Taiwan government website will be sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan. The contest lasts from Nov. 21-30. We believe we have a good shot at winning with a little help from our friends. Will you commit to voting once per day for us?

If so, please post YES on the wall of our Facebook group or email me so that we can send daily reminder messages. We will only send one message per day. The messages will stop either by Nov. 30 or whenever it becomes evident that we have no chance of winning, whichever comes first.

In the meantime, please follow the below instructions to vote. It literally takes less than one minute:

1) Click this link: http://activity.taiwan.gov.tw/twfriends/SayHelloToTaiwanFBList.aspx?cword=U&cid=198&tid=123
2) This is our team page, "Flying Tigers - Happy Birthday, Republic of China.' Click the green Facebook 'Like' button.
3) Click 'Login with Facebook.'
4) Click 'yes' to Facebook integrating with the site. *Note that this will not post any activity to your wall.
5) Enter your email/phone number and security code (this info, from what I understand, will only be used to notify the daily voter prize - yes, you are entered by voting). Click 'OK'.
6) YOU HAVE VOTED! WE ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO TAIWAN!!!
7) Repeat when you receive our daily email reminder.

Thanks for your help! We are already No. 3 in the U.S. and climbing, but it's critical that we move into the top 10 in the world today, especially while our competitors in Asia are sleeping!

Stop Waiting on the World to Change

2011-07-29T03:55:00.002-04:00

It's a friendly sounding little tune, but simmering under the catchy melody is a sinister message.

Though I'm mostly a fan, John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change" has always irked me. It's not just the sound of the song (though I hate those bells used in the intro and interludes). It's the lyrics.

I would ask if you've heard the song, but I'll assume that you've turned on a radio in the last three years. On the surface, it's a protest against against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a cry of frustration from a generation that's misunderstood and exasperated with stubborn leaders and a perceived powerlessness to effect change.

The sentiment seems right on target, especially as our legislators butt heads over raising our national debt ceiling. How can We the People be blamed for the polarized political system we've inherited? Maybe we should just hold on until the crisis passes, like an earthquake or a seizure. Maybe we should just wait, and the world will heal itself.

But listen a little closer and you'll hear the problem with the song. It subtly permits us to do nothing, assuming our efforts will be futile anyway. It's classic ostrich mentality, where passivity becomes a form of self-righteous protest.

Though the song presents it in a government-citizen context, I think waiting on the world to change has become a guiding personal philosophy for many. We see it in the erosion of responsibility in our country as more people rely on the government to meet their needs, their entitled mind telling them all the while that this is the way it should be.

Even worse is the way it has seeped into men's lives. I need look no further than the mirror for evidence. I'm often waiting on my job, marriage, faith, Chinese language ability or any number of aspects of my life to change, rarely recognizing that if I would just do something about it, they probably would.

We live in a spoiled generation - at least I do. Pessimists will disagree, pointing out issues like global warming and the fact that last year's doomsday recession still has some people checking the unemployment rate like it's the weather.

Still, think of the progression our fathers and grandfathers faced: World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the Korean War and Vietnam. They knew real crises; we often melt down at the slightest inconvenience.

This is neither American nor manly nor Christian. Men take responsibility, even when it's not their fault, knowing that ownership of the problem gives them the ability to fix it. Christian men don't lament that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They dive into the fire to keep the basket from burning. We must reclaim that spirit.

Start today. Whatever the problem is - family, finances, career - become the solution. Stop waiting on your world to change. Change it yourself.

Puerto Rico on Four Wheels

2011-07-13T11:00:00.002-04:00

The motorcycle zipped past, riding the dotted center line that separated my rental car from the one just a few feet into the next lane. My wife gasped. We looked at each other, eyes wide, then wondered aloud why someone would risk his life to show off for motorists he doesn't know or shave a few seconds off his commute.

I would say we couldn't believe it happened, but after a few days of driving in Puerto Rico, it wasn't much of a stretch.

I was warned that driving would be an adventure in the island territory, and we weren't disappointed. Along with the motorcycle fiasco in San Juan, we were trailed by an old clunker in Isabela that rode our bumper for miles, beeping fanatically until we finally pulled over to let him pass.

Generally, driving in Puerto Rico isn't stressful if you see it as an exercise in cultural adaptation. Just as you reset your watch in a new time zone, you have to learn a different brand of road etiquette when entering a new place, even if the traffic laws are the same. Here are a few rules that I learned while urging my gray, four-cylinder Kia Rio up near-vertical hills in the rainforest and across freeways spanning the island from east to west:

Our Kia Rio in Pinones.

1. Yellow lights mean speed up. Traffic lights rigged with cameras don't seem to have made their debut in Puerto Rico.

2. Drag racing is permitted (perhaps encouraged) in parking decks.

3. The crowded, brick-paved streets of Old San Juan could hold the world parallel parking championships. Extra points are awarded for moving trash cans to open up spots that obviously aren't big enough for your car.

4. Dents in the island's ubiquitous Toyota sedans are more like scars on a warrior than blemishes on a maiden. These show that the car has taken on Puerto Rican traffic and lived to tell about it.

5. Exceeding the speed limit while going backwards on a dead-end street is OK, as long as the other cars frantically move out of the way.

6. If you are an outsider, you must rent a Kia Rio, a Jeep, or a Toyota FJ Cruiser sport utility vehicle.

Perhaps the biggest driving rule could be borrowed from a mob boss's manual: If you want something, you just have to take it, whether a U-turn that would make your driver's ed teacher cringe or a better spot in line at the red light. A little bit of offensive driving helps earn your street cred, showing other cars that you will nose yourself into that lane, no matter how loudly their horns protest.

A tunnel of trees driving east from San Juan.

The surge of confidence this brings is amazing. I quickly learned to honk while rounding narrow, blind curves in the rainforest. I slowed to miss iguanas in the road and accelerated through yellow lights. I even began converting kilometers to miles, a skill that evaporated again as soon as I arrived back in Georgia. (In Puerto Rico, distances are measured in kilometers, though speed limits are in miles per hour.)

In some ways, I would've liked to have better public transport options, even those that are less than official, like Panama's red-devil buses or the makeshift cabs I hailed in Mongolia. But this was my first time driving abroad, and it felt freeing. Our exploration wasn't limited by train or bus schedules, and a $3 map from Walgreens was the only ticket we needed to access this scenic and photogenic 90- by 30-mile world. As the concierge at our first hotel said, you can never get lost. On this island, you'll always know where you are. You're in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rican Hotel Hopping

2011-06-28T03:39:00.001-04:00

Five nights, four hotels, one amazing trip

Walking Old San Juan just after arriving from Atlanta.

For all the men out there planning an anniversary trip, let me save you some trouble: If it's a five-night excursion, try to stay in fewer than four hotels.

As my wife Katy and I prepared to celebrate four years of marriage, we had different desires in mind.

She wanted a beach trip, complete with umbrella drinks and cabana boys. I wanted adventure. We were both looking for a sunny spot where we could experience a different culture.

We settled on Puerto Rico. It's technically in the U.S., being a commonwealth and all, but its people and geography were totally foreign to us as mainlanders. The flights to San Juan were affordable, and the island promised a good mix of outdoor activity and beach bumming. I couldn't wait to dust off my rusty, limited Spanish. Katy packed some books and magazines, preparing to dust off a few beach chairs.

With the destination set, we started working on where to stay and what to do. Katy left most of the planning to me, since I arrange about four overseas trips a year for my work as an international business reporter.

Here's the problem: I only require three things from business hotels - low price, fast Internet and some kind of bed. As I remembered from our honeymoon, making plans for two is much more complex.

I became overwhelmed with all the criteria swimming in my head as I surfed the Web.

I wanted romance without breaking the bank. I wanted a secluded beach that wasn't too far from the city. I wanted to be able to move around the island without feeling rushed. I wracked my brain, talked to Puerto Rican acquaintances and scoured the Internet, hoping to find the perfect mix.

In the end, since all the resorts seemed like equally suitable bases for exploring the capital city, price became a prime factor in San Juan, where we would at least start our journey. Priceline won out, since we could save 50 percent off the going rate on Hotels.com and other sites by naming a price. And with all the added fees that resorts pile on in San Juan, shaving half off the top helped keep these places in our price range.

There was another factor for using Priceline. We were booking two nights at first but figured Priceline would allow us to extend at least one night at the same rate. If we hated our hotel or wanted to venture out into the countryside, we could move on.

This did give us more options, but it also meant I had more chances to mess things up...

Conrad Condado Plaza

Looking west from Conrad Condado Plaza at dusk.

Condado, a trendy district just east of Old San Juan, was the area where the city's resort scene first took root. Its heyday might've been last century, but I saw no lull in activity.

Along Avenida Ashford, locals came out in the waning sunlight to run along the sidewalks. As night fell, cars jammed the main thoroughfare on their way to the area's many restaurants, bars and casinos. Extensive reconstruction in the already bustling district should add even more vitality when completed.

The taxi from the airport dropped us off at the Conrad Condado Plaza (an $18 fare) on a rainy Thursday afternoon around 2 p.m. The check-in was seamless, though the room wasn't ready, and the attendant in a dark lobby seemed to be tolerating more than welcoming us. As the concierge took our bags, we took a $14 cab to Old San Juan to wander around. An hour or so later we got the call indicating our room was ready, right on time.

The ninth-floor room was spacious with a comfortable queen-size bed and a balcony overlooking the city, though there was no outdoor seating. Maybe they figured people with city-view rooms couldn't possibly want to enjoy coffee in breeze coming off the lagoon in the morning.

Inside, the room had a deep red accent wall with a matching L-shaped sofa, dark wood furniture and a white flat-panel TV. An art piece depicting a black-and-white flower was centered above the bed, giving off a very Japanese/modern feel.

I guess it's a matter of taste, but it seemed like the overall decor of the hotel was a bit too modern, as if it were trying to compensate for its age, like an old lady wearing too much makeup. But it was pleasant, and we found the room quite comfortable.

We particularly liked the large bathroom. The glass-encased shower was an unintended anniversary present for me, since Katy hates how I fog up the mirror while she's trying to put on makeup.

A few qualms with this hotel:

-10 percent resort fee, whether or not you make use of resort services

-$16 fee for a spot in the dungeon of a parking garage

-Staff was helpful when you could get them, but the phones seemed to ring a long time. A pile of dirty dishes left by a beach chair in the morning was in the same spot 12 hours later.

-Not the place for a beach getaway. There's only one tiny sliver of public beach adjacent to the hotel, and chairs must be rented.

-No one offered to take our bags to our room. I probably wouldn't have let them, but at least give me the option if you're going to charge a resort fee.

A few bright spots:

-Very close to Old San Juan, though this makes the $14 one-way taxi fare set by

the government seem outrageous. The B21 and C53 buses to the old city stop

in front of the hotel every 20 minutes during the week and every half hour on

weekends. I've read that fares are from $0.50 in exact change if you can stand

the wait.

-Very cheerful and helpful concierge desk, especially Yomary.

-Great pools and nice grounds overlooking the ocean.

-Starbucks downstairs that will deliver coffee to your room.

-Free and fast wi-fi.

Villa Tropical

Sunset on Shacks Beach in front of Villa Tropical.

After two nights in San Juan, we set off for a day of ziplining at Toro Verde Adventure Park in Orocovis and horseback riding on the beach in Isabela, a small town about two hours west of the capital. Since we were driving a lot, I figured we might as well find a charming place to stay on the beach, away from the crowds.

From the reviews on Trip Advisor, Villa Tropical seemed like a winner. It's a hotel split into apartment units right on Shacks Beach between Isabela and Aguadilla, with easy walking and driving access to other beaches.

But once we arrived, it quickly became evident that not all of its units were created equal. The five-star reviews that had drawn my attention came from folks who could watch the sun fade into the ocean from their beachfront decks.

Stupidly, to save a few bucks I chose 1B, a studio on the first floor in the back of the building, above the office and away from the beach. Sure, it had a full kitchen and separate bedroom, but it smelled of age and mildew. The dated bathroom was 1970s yellow and had no hot water. To boot, we were charged a $25 cleaning fee for only staying one night, bringing the price with tax up to $140. That could've bought us a resort room in San Juan at what we were paying.

The words from the lady who handled my booking haunted me: "Your wife will like the one on the beach better," she had said. She was right. As far as Katy was concerned, there was nothing redeeming about my selection, whether or not it was steps away from white sands and a coral reef.

She felt like a mountain climber who comes down too fast from altitude and gets sick. I made a note to never again to slip down the quality scale so quickly.

To be fair, Villa Tropical did have its charms. Trevor, one of the owners, has put together a fantastic, detailed guide to area restaurants and attractions.

Our one sunset was indeed beautiful. The atmosphere was very homey and laid back. We were offered some Coronas from a community cooler downstairs, for instance.

Families were around, but the beach still felt secluded when we spent time there in the morning.

Honestly, I think our disappointment with this property came partly from faulty expectations and the high price that we agreed to pay because we were rushed. If we had expected a low-key surfer's haven and paid half the price, I think we would've had a different feeling altogether.

Ritz-Carlton San Juan

A glimpse of the immaculate grounds of the Ritz-Carlton San Juan.

Redemption is oh-so-sweet. After bombing on Villa Tropical, we skyrocketed up back up the quality ladder when we landed at the Ritz-Carlton San Juan in Isla Verde for our fourth night.

It was our first time at any Ritz property, and it met our expectations. Everyone, from smiling Monique at the front desk to the guy who swathed our (free) beach chairs with towels for us, seemed to be enjoying their job, and they passed on this feeling of satisfaction to the guests.

The luxury was in the little things. We were greeted with fresh papaya juice when we checked in an hour early. We were asked three times if we needed someone to help with our bags. Next to the pools and on the beach were towel stations with urns of lemon- or pineapple-infused ice water. When we headed to the beach the next morning, we found bowls of chilled oranges set out for guests.

The room wasn't overtly opulent. The decor was simple and traditional, and the furniture was nice. The bathroom, filled with grayish-tan marble, was the real star. My only qualm was looking out the window to see the dingy hotel next door, but you get what you pay for with regard to the view.

Probably the most refreshing thing about the Ritz was that although it was the only place where a resort fee was justified, we didn't have to pay one.

And I didn't feel like they were out to nickel and dime me. There was a $17 daily parking fee, but beach chairs and wireless Internet, which I've had to pay for a la carte at inferior hotels, were free of charge. Also free were the services of the staff, who would help set up chairs by the pool or beach. You could even leave your towels on the chair when done, and they would come by and pick them up. (Can you tell I'm not used to luxury travel?)

In short, if we have the budget for it, we'll definitely return to the Ritz if we're in San Juan again.

Gran Melia

La Coca Falls at El Yunque National Forest, near Rio Grande.

Sadly, Hotels.com credit only goes so far, and we had to leave the Ritz after one night, but not before the staff offered to allow us to use the facilities for as long as we wanted for the rest of the day.

After lunch, we headed out to Gran Melia, a golf resort that sits on a peninsula in Rio Grande, which is 30-45 minutes east of San Juan near El Yunque, Puerto Rico's famous rainforest.

We arrived at 5 p.m., an hour after our designated check-in time. When the room wasn't ready, the front desk attendant offered no apology. "Maybe they are behind?" she ventured, without a hint of regret. Luckily the room opened up just as we were heading toward the hospitality room to change and head to the pool.

Gran Melia was an interesting place. It had the feel of a compound where leaving was discouraged. To get to the resort, you drive 10 minutes north from Route 3 on a road that winds through security gates, around fountains and past empty Donald Trump condos, all surrounded by a golf course where no one seemed to be playing. The lack of activity was a bit eerie.

We quickly realized we probably aren't the right clientele for this place, which seemed perfectly suited for business travelers looking for a laid-back rendezvous or families looking to enjoy the beach and the pool. We enjoy a relaxing atmosphere, but we also want to do some things outside the hotel gates.

The rooms were in 19 separate bungalows reached by a short walk or golf-cart ride. Ours was a large suite in Bungalow 18 with a very nice bathroom and big patio. All the floors were a light marble. I can't complain about the room, other than the mattress on the king-size bed. It had no pad and you could feel the mattress pilling beneath the sheets.

The grounds were extensive and include a long, calm beach where we watched the sun sink in to the ocean. With no more chance of tanning, we sought an outdoor hot tub and found the only one was in the spa. Even when it was open, you have to reserve it, but alas, it was closed.

My favorite asthetic aspect of this hotel was the outdoor lobby and the restaurants surrounding the main office. Candles illuminated the area at night, giving it a romantic feel.

Saint Brad of St. Louis

2011-06-26T10:07:00.001-04:00

He stands like a statue, motionless except for the baggy, white clothes fluttering in a strong westward breeze from the Mississippi. He wears a backwards baseball cap emblazoned with a cross over a pure white bandanna. Back to the river, he stares silent and still at the Gateway Arch, the symbol of the city he is trying to save. In his left hand he holds a large Christian flag that billows in the wind. At his feet is a towel, positioned like a prayer mat on the hard concrete.

Passing tourists are puzzled. Everything else about the day seems so normal, peaceful even. Jazz floats on the wind from a moored riverboat. People snap photos and marvel at the arch's elliptical wonder.

But this strange man stands out; he emanates mystery. He begs for engagement, either in ridicule or just plain curiosity, but no one dares approach. The saint of St. Louis never moves. His sunglasses remain fixed on the arch and the souls milling around it.

In town for a wedding, our family encounters him on a quick trip to the city's iconic monument, which stands as a symbol of America's bold shift westward at the turn of the 20th century.

After staring for a few moments at this odd display of faith, I decide there's no way I'll find out what sparked it unless I ask. Having shared my faith overseas and encountered university street preachers barking hellfire and brimstone, I've been fascinated with how people try to fulfill God's command to make disciples of all nations.

"Onward Christian soldier," I say as I approach, mentioning the Christian hymn as if it's a secret password designed to break his stony gaze.

He seems surprised, as if this is a first, but keeps his stark posture as we begin to talk. I quickly spring into interview mode. Under his superhero getup is a story of faith more interesting than I could've expected.

A few years ago, Brad Lee was living a rebellious lifestyle and felt that nothing could touch him, but it didn't take long for life to shatter his facade of independence. A female friend, Sunshine, was diagnosed with cancer, and the doctors weren't sure she would survive. The news sent him into a tailspin. Broken down, he cried out desperately for God's help.

Brad felt God drawing him toward repentance. Somehow God revealed that he was not a genie in a bottle. It would take commitment - a full turn from Brad's careless ways - for his prayers to have any weight.

Relationship with God restored, Brad turned his attention and prayers to Sunshine. For him, those Bible references to healing weren't literary devices. They were promises that God hears his saints and responds when they ask for something in the name of Jesus.With the zeal of a radically new believer, he threw himself into fasting and prayer. In light of God's power, he would only accept a full recovery.

Though given only three months to live, Sunshine's health began to dramatically improve. Eventually she was cured completely. Brad saw this not only as an answered prayer, but a new commission. He would pray for as many people as possible, hoping God might similarly change their fate.

So now he stands stoically in the same spot every Sunday from noon to 3 p.m., three solid hours faithfully hoping and praying that God will lead an injured soul his way.

I lay my hand on his shoulder and pray for his ministry. Then I walk away scratching my head. It's not that I question Sunshine's healing, but almost automatically I begin questioning Brad's methodology. Does the healing of someone you love give you the gift of healing? Will God will hear your prayers for any stranger on the street? And the pure white clothes, the Christian flag, the way he almost tests God by showing up in the same place every week - Isn't it just a bit, well, crazy?

After turning it over in my mind, I decide that it is. But instead of leaving me feeling superior, this realization leaves me convicted.

Brad has the audacity, born of faith, to actually believe what Jesus says, that we will do greater things than he, that prayers seeking his kingdom will be granted. I rarely venture to a place where worldly wisdom runs out, where risk forces me to rely on God's power. I never ask for it, and then I wonder where it is.

I think every true believer needs a dose of craziness, at least by the world's standards (think Noah, John the Baptist, even Jesus). Maybe then our first reaction to an act of radical faith won't be criticism, but celebration knowing that there are still some of us out there who take God at his word, despite what others - even our fellow believers - might think.

Back from the dead...again?

2011-06-24T01:32:00.001-04:00

You can run Michael Myers over with a car, chop his head clean off with an axe or riddle him with bullets, but you can never be sure he's dead until they stop making Halloween sequels.

That's kind of how I feel about this blog. The credits have long rolled, and the few readers I once had probably forgot it existed. But I'm trying to learn a lesson in perseverance from the masked madman: It's never too late for a comeback. Hopefully my writing won't be quite as terrifying as that pale face and those hollow, unfeeling eyes.

Those (very few) who followed me before might scoff. I have promised to reboot this blog in the past, they'll rightly point out. It's true, and I have no other defense than to say that I sincerely hope that this time will be different, that I will truly repent of my non-blogging ways.

The problem has never been lack of material. I've been pressed a little for time over the past year or two, but I've had plenty of adventures worth sharing in travel, writing, marriage, church and other aspects of life.

I think my main impediment has been perfectionism. I never wanted to be one of those bloggers who shares everything he ate for breakfast or bought at the grocery store that day. (That's what Twitter's for, right?) I'm not necessarily knocking such writers. Many of them of them employ a great mix of knowledge, humor and raw personality that have won them audiences far larger than I'll ever attract.

I guess I feel that blogging is a bit like karaoke for writers, at least in the way I've approached it. A man who knows he can't sing has no problem making a fool of himself on stage at the karaoke bar. It's a bit harder for an award-winning tenor to let loose and belt out "Friends in Low Places." He's got a lot more invested in his identity as a singer, and therefore, more to lose if he screws it up.

Not that my writing is as sweet as Frank Sinatra's voice. That's where the analogy breaks down. What I'm saying is that I always feel like I have to write something groundbreaking in order for it to be worth sharing, when that's really not the case at all. I've withheld too many insights (and blunders), and I've failed to share countless travel experiences that might have proven useful to others, all because I've been too scared to miss a note. Now I'm going to try to lighten up, join the party and have some fun.

So here's what you can expect: I know that most blogs these days have a predictable editorial direction. Some folks pontificate about money, travel, raising children, church planting or another niche in which they've got hard-earned (or self-declared) expertise. I work in online media, so I know that specialization is the key to successful blogging, but that's not what I envision here. My thoughts will be the glue that holds Still Standing together.

I'm not veering totally into left field. I plan to introduce pages to corral posts on some of my more prominent themes, like travel, faith, manhood, family and China. I expect that other blogs (hopefully one on short-term missions in China, specifically) will branch off from this page. Then, I'll try to build a loyal following based on the principles of content marketing.

For now, just consider me back for yet another thrilling sequel.

Cue the Halloween theme song...

It Feels Good to Be Rich

2010-08-30T02:28:00.002-04:00

My friend Brad is giddy after visiting a Chinese ATM in 2006.

I didn't win the lottery. I haven't come into an inheritance. I'm still working as a reporter. But it feels good to know that I'm rich.

I've got a $20 bill in my wallet. It has been there for weeks. I rarely use cash, so I don't remember when I got it out of the ATM or for what purpose. Maybe it was a yard-sale stash or feed for the parking meters around Atlanta. Maybe it was left over from paying a friend back for Braves tickets. In any case, it still lingers behind receipts, coupons and business cards, just waiting for a chance to be broken.

I was sifting through the ads in the newspaper this morning. I usually only glance at a few nowadays. I took a brief look at the digital cameras, then moved on. It's not that I don't like gadgets, but looking is pretty much pointless. I already have anything that could come close to qualifying as a necessity for work or play.

It's striking to me, especially with the job shortage and the ailing stock market, how easy my life is, how many luxuries I enjoy without much thought. I flip a switch and lights come on. I pull a lever, and scalding hot water flows. My pantry is full, and I generally eat until I am as well. I could drive to California any day, and both my cars could make the trip. Every month I unearth a new pile of clothes to give away.

My charmed life extends beyond basic needs. In college, I used to hold onto gas receipts. Now they're useless. Though I have a gas budget, I rarely even look at the cost when the pump clicks off. Sadly, though, I've known people who put in a few bucks at a time as they wait for a paycheck to come through. Others only have one option: the bus.

My access to communications is further proof of the exceptional grace given to me. Driving through Atlanta the other day, I saw probably a hundred people lined up in the hot sun to sign up for government-assisted home phone service. As they scrambled for the basics, I was chatting on my cell phone. The next day, I logged onto my Comcast Internet connection to make local and long distance calls via Gmail.

I don't show all this to note any empirical personal wealth. Let's just say I'm not someone you'd invite to a political fund-raising banquet. My point is that modern American society has conditioned us to expect a degree of convenience that most of the world's inhabitants will never approach, and it's worrisome that we're no longer shocked by how much of an outlier our country is.

Of course, poverty exists in the U.S., but most Americans treat wealth like fish treat water. We swim in it, breathe through it, feel at home in it, but we never know we're wet. Our chosen peers reinforce our accustomed levels of convenience, and we race each other to the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder. As we climb, so do our living standards, and the things that were once wants are now needed at once.

The Bible is full of warnings to the greedy. Jesus ranted against the money-grubbing Pharisees. Paul warned his spiritual son Timothy about the division that wealthy individuals can sow in the church. James also cautioned against putting trust in things, not God. For the longest time, when reading these passages, I would silently join the biblical writers' critique of their opponents. After all, I wasn't rich. How could these comments possibly apply to me?

But I realized later that I wasn't grasping what they were saying and that the global economy imposes a newer, more stringent set of obligations on the Christian. We can activate humanitarian aid with the click of a mouse or travel to the other side of the planet in less than 24 hours. In a way, we have become neighbors with the nearly half the world's population that lives each full day on less than many of us spend on a coffee or latte every morning.

In this context, most Americans are rich, and that's not a bad thing. I won't call us a "chosen nation," as many do, but I do think God allows America to prosper so that we can facilitate the spread of the Gospel around the world. Our Lord doesn't need more storehouses in our backyards. He wants us to invest in a new harvest.

Learning from the Korean Passion

2010-08-24T01:31:00.001-04:00

Business events aren't usually known for their spiritual flair. It's a rare occasion that I walk into a trade conference in Atlanta and encounter a religious invocation.

In America, even if many attendees are Christian, general consideration for adherents of other faiths dictates that we steer clear of rhetoric or actions that could remotely be perceived as intimidating or offensive. (Politically correct translation: Words or deeds that actually express an opinion or belief.)

Refreshingly, Koreans don't seem to have this problem.

At a recent Korean trade event in Atlanta, the opening banquet started with a prayer, and not one of those stale, impotent supplications to some distant cloud-sitter. The pastor actually mentioned Jesus and asked for things, big things, like the eradication of poverty through the prosperous business deals that would emerge from the conference. This was not your ordinary moment of silence.

Whether it's inherited or culturally learned, Koreans have an unquestionable zeal for living, a fervent emotionalism that guides thought and action. I've seen it and read about it on occasion, and I've heard from Americans doing business there that this can be both an asset and a hurdle.

Korean businesspeople, a high-level American executive told me, can be reluctant to make a decision, but "get out of the way" when they do. When the slow deliberations have ended, they bolt with a gazelle's speed.

This passion can become a hassle. I've heard outsiders, especially Americans, say that organizing an event with Koreans is next to impossible. This unnamed passion, this zeal for life, is transmuted into a disgust for those who don't share the same lofty vision. Consensus comes only after what we might consider inordinate amounts of bickering. Don't believe me? Ask the Korean lawmakers who were sprayed with fire extinguishers by their political opponents as they used a sledgehammer and electric saw to break into a committee room in December 2008. Barred from what could've been a decisive vote on their country's FTA with the U.S., they didn't let a little thing like locked doors get in the way.

The author of the Korea Dispatch blog calls the phenomenon "Korea's Emotional Logic" and describes the difficulty of cross-cultural communication:

Look at the disparity between how Westerners, both in Korean and abroad, view current events and how Koreans see things. It’s like they talk around each other, rarely if ever connecting, even when speaking the same language, whether Korean or English. One side is trying to apply logic while the other is speaking from the heart. It’s not that one is right and the other wrong. It’s that they just don’t connect.

The Western pursuit of logic, has left us somewhat cold, unwilling to live from the heart, the author goes on to say. It's exactly the Korean propensity to let the heart have its say that I found so refreshing while meeting people in Seoul last year, especially in the context of faith.

Take Eu-jin, the computer science major turned kindergarten teacher who was searching for a way to glorify God with her life, or Eun-hye, known by the English name Chloe at her hagwan, who was determined to find a way to take the gospel of Jesus to North Korea. Then there was Mr. Shin, a complete stranger, who just five minutes after meeting me on the subway escorted me to his church, where I ate the most hospitable potluck lunch I've ever had.

Ambitious dreams and sincere hospitality don't come from logic. They emanate from passionate hearts. We'd do well to take a page from Korea's book and love a little - before our minds get in the way.

Avoiding the Seven Demons

2010-07-27T03:17:00.224-04:00

I've always been perplexed by the passage in Luke 11, where the Pharisees accuse Jesus of using the power of Satan to drive out evil spirits.

It's not so much Jesus's refutation that confuses me. In the discussion, he coins the phrase that Abraham Lincoln borrowed - a kingdom divided itself cannot stand - to show that Satan's forces can't survive if they war against each other. He then uses a parable about robbing a strong man's house to explain to that although our enemy has a formidable powers, he is easily bound and overtaken by his maker.

I'm good up to this point, but it gets a little trickier in the teaching moment afterward, when Jesus turns away from the immediate treatment of good vs. evil and begins directing criticism toward the Jews' unbelief. He drops this bomb on us that I have never been quite able to comprehend (vv. 24-26):

"When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first."

Commentators treat the passage in various ways. Matthew Henry discusses it in the context of salvation and the Word, similar to Jesus's treatment of the seed that fell on rocky soil. Some repent from their sins and clean themselves up outwardly, believing that a set of actions has made them acceptable before God. But if they have no root, if they don't submit to a deeper cleaning of the heart, they will just be making a mockery of the Gospel and their final state will be worse than the first.

More generally, I like to think of this passage as illustrating the idea that it's not enough just to avoid sin. Just following a set of rules does not lead to abundant life. It's not enough to shampoo the carpets, mop the floors and spray a little spiritual air freshener in our hearts. We don't need redecoration. We need a total renovation. In other words, I think Jesus is saying that we can't just focus on removing the old. We have to replace it with something new and different.

There's a TV show called "Moving Up" that tracks three families moving into each other's homes. In the opening interviews, the families talk about their beloved houses and how devastated they would be if the new owners change things. At the end, they return to see what's been done. Most are disappointed to see that what's remembered as a cozy nest has become completely foreign. Even if they appreciate the new owners' design sense, the new paint, accessories and furniture change the identity of the place. "This is not my house," they often say, their nostalgia tinged with disgust.

I think Jesus is saying that our hearts should be similarly inhospitable to the evil influences that once controlled our lives. In the context of demon possession, obviously this is more literal: evil spirits can't only be sanitized; they must be replaced by a new resident, the Holy Spirit. But I think this applies more generally to our personal lives as well. We often ask sinners to clean themselves up, but we don't treat the underlying cause of the mess: their hearts, which have their tables set for a demonic dinner party.

Of course, we must start with letting go of the desires that once ruled us, driving out the evil forces that once roosted in our hearts, but again, this not enough. Buddhists think that desire is the root of suffering, so we must detach from it completely. The problem is that in doing so, they are desiring a world without suffering, making their quest self-contradictory. Instead, our desires must be totally reoriented. We are not just saved from sin. We are saved into Christ. The old is gone. If the new has not come, the old will return.

Avoiding the seven demons' return - and the Christian life in general - isn't just about abstinence from the desires of the flesh. It's about indulging ourselves in Godly pursuits, thereby crowding out old habits and former identities.

We're Not Who We Think (or Say) We Are

2010-07-26T23:28:00.006-04:00

Social media is a really convenient tool. Some say its magic is in the fact that it allows for transparency like never before. Politicians use Twitter to stay connected with their constituents. Parents can spy on their teenyboppers' online lives. Bosses can get a glimpse of their employees' true character out of the office.

While these are noble uses, I say the true advantage of these websites is their cloak-and-dagger aspect, the fact that we can hide our real selves behind the idealistic versions we post online.

It's really brilliant if you think about it. Other than people's comments, we control every part of our profiles. Want to be a jazz lover? Put it on your profile. Think it would up your coolness factor to show off the fried green tomatoes you cooked for dinner? Put it on your profile. Want to seem really spiritual and/or philosophical before meeting your girlfriend's parents? A few C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton quotes can go a long way. Heck, just put 'em both on there. Who's going to have the guts to ask if you really like British Christian authors from the early-to-mid-20th century, or if you were just using them to burnish your Bible-bearing reputation?

And the clandestine cover-up can even go beyond our likes and dislikes. It covers our interactions with other virtual selves as well. We can post glowing status updates about our spouses when they do something nice for us while totally redacting the bumpy parts of our relationship. We can have a knock-down, drag-out debate on someone's comment stream, and all we have to do is press the caps lock key to "raise our voice."

Seriously, though, I've been thinking about my Twitter profile. Setting aside the fact that it's tough to learn anything about someone in 140 characters, I've been evaluating whether I did a good job encapsulating myself. As I was looking at the list of attributes, all meant to draw eyeballs to my own radiant little twittersphere, I realized that while many of them are true of me currently, some are true to who I once was, who I think I am, or who I wish to be. They're not actually me. Take a look:

Global business reporter, writer, missions enthusiast, musician, blogger, China lover and wanna-be world traveler looking to share the Good News.

Take "blogger," for example. I've written two posts in the seven months of 2010, and I have no paid blogging gigs. You tell me if I'm really a blogger or if I just have a website on Blogger.com.

Take "musician." Do I play guitar and sing? Yes. Do I play guitar and sing where people (besides my upstairs neighbors) can hear me? Not since I last led worship at church. And I've never consistently played public shows featuring my own music. You tell me if I'm really a musician or simply someone with a guitar and a hobby.

I could go on ripping myself, but the point is that we're not always who we think or say we are, and we can easily trick ourselves into believing that who we intend to be really matches the person we see in the mirror. I can disseminate missions information online; I can read books of God's exploits in foreign lands and call myself a "missions enthusiast." But if I'm not sharing the Gospel with people and helping others reach the ends of the globe, it's not really a part of my identity. It's a pretty feather in my cap, not a raging fire in my bones that spurs me to action.

We are predisposed to see ourselves better than we actually are, and ironically this problem seems to become more acute the less confident we are about ourselves. Evolutionists probably link this phenomenon to our survival instincts. Christians might say it's a vestige of the pride still ingrained in us by original sin.

Either way, the solution is the same: test yourself by what you do, not what you intend. (Other people are quite helpful with this exercise, especially spouses.)

Here's an example: I realized last year that I was telling people that I was learning Chinese even though I wasn't practicing regularly. Turns out I really just wanted to impress people, especially those I met through work. To fix the problem, I started studying again, and in so doing made good on my desire.

If you want to do something, don't leave it there. Act in a way that gives legs to your intention. If you can't or won't, question whether it's a true desire, or just something you use to give yourself some cachet at social gatherings or through social media.

Most importantly, apply these principles to your faith. Call ourselves Christians and say we love God though we might, the fruit speaks for itself. I'll spare you the litany of passages featuring smug "believers" who thought well of themselves while they were actually acting against God. It will suffice to leave with a word from James 2:18:

But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

We are not who we think or say we are. We are the person, and the Christian, our actions prove us to be.

What Would Jesus Tweet?

2010-07-25T01:03:00.014-04:00

Come, follow me.

In the age of Twitter, "following" someone has become as easy as the click of a button.

It wasn't so simple 2,000 years ago, when Jesus searched for his true disciples. He had no email newsletter, no Facebook page on which to post photos and updates. He didn't have a website where millions could convene virtually to download sermon podcasts or submit prayer requests.

His was a day when a teacher's shoe leather was his bandwidth, and his sphere of influence was as large as the area his feet could travel. His audience consisted of real people with skin on, seen eye to eye, not faceless Google bots or Web perusers.

In a three-year public ministry, Jesus attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom dropped everything - their careers, reputations, even their families - to become fiercely loyal vagabonds.

His bombastic message gripped hearers across geographic or socioeconomic barriers. Thousands listened to him for hours at a time, often enduring hunger and fatigue as they hung on his words. When he spoke in a house, crowds spilled into the street. When he spoke at the beach, they pressed in so tightly that a fishing boat became his pulpit.

There's probably a reason Jesus's advent came before the age before electricity and mass communication. He preferred to see, touch and hear those to whom he ministered. As far as we know, he didn't write. He passed on his message not by adding his voice to world literature, but by loving his followers and making them vessels of his message.

Still, I have to think that if Jesus were to descend today to a world where we hide behind computer screens, the same principles that made him a magnet in the real world would lead to an engaging online presence. In fact, the more I think about it, Jesus - as if we could expect less - would be the perfect Twitter user, that is, if he decided the micro-blogging service was worth his time, which is a whole separate matter.

Check out just a few of the attributes that would help him draw droves of followers:

Unique, simple message. For most of us, it's hard to squeeze a list of what we ate for lunch into a single tweet. Jesus was a master at crystallizing weighty spiritual truths in easily digestible formats, like parables. He never minced words. He was clear, direct and to the point and would have no trouble staying below 140 characters. People liked him or hated him, but they never ignored him. Getting noticed is the first step to snagging more followers.

Selflessness and relevance. Want to end up sobbing in a lonely corner of the Internet, lamenting a rash of unfollows? Go on gabbing about yourself. Twitter, like the Web in general, is a place for sharing. Followers will flee shameless self-promoters who constantly ask them to "check out" information that ultimately isn't useful. Jesus never had to beg for followers, because he was worth following in the first place. He never testified about himself unless asked, and he always reached into the heart of things. Everything he said affected the eternal destiny of those within earshot. It doesn't get more personally relevant than that.

Controversy and offline buzz. Online kingpins don't always get that way by being tech-savvy or by following everyone in sight. They do things that are worth talking about in real life. With Twitter increasingly used in conversation, these stories can multiply rapidly. With such extreme behaviors as raising the dead, healing the blind with saliva and turning over temple tables, Jesus would have no problem making the trending topics list.

Irresistible invitation. Jesus commands that we not only follow him, but that we live by the messages he gives us. He hand picked his 12 disciples and he's asking us to join the caravan.

Are you on his list?

Follow Trevor on Twitter

Will the Poor Always Be With Us? Jesus vs. Muhammad Yunus

2010-04-27T15:15:00.001-04:00

Nobel Prize-winning economics professor and "banker to the poor" Muhammad Yunus visited Atlanta last month and spoke about the prospect of eradicating poverty to the point that one day we would take our children to see "poverty museums."

In Mr. Yunus' ideal future world, our kids would have to learn from a retrospective distance what they could not experience in the now: the sickness, starvation and abject lack that come with the inability to afford basic needs like food, clothing and shelter.

I applaud his vision and his efforts to make it a reality, but I wonder if it's a bit naive. Assuming that everyone (or even a slight majority) could learn to practice, like Mr. Yunus, the ideal of helping the poor help themselves, a world without poverty is at least imaginable. But it's hard to make that assumption, given our proclivity to act in our own self-interests at almost any cost. Even our charitable donations are mostly given out of our wealth, not any meaningful sacrifice (I'm preaching to myself here, by the way). How can we lift others out of poverty without giving up comfort and convenience? And how will people learn to sacrifice when the world's ideology tells them to get what they can in this moment?

Our methods of spreading wealth and providing for others may get better, but it's hard to see human nature changing. It's also hard to see our world economy developing without our definition of poverty shifting. Even if we totally eliminate poverty as we now define it, isn't it conceivable that in a wealthy world where a sense of personal entitlement is only getting stronger, a socioeconomic status now seen as middle class will be considered impoverished?

Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, but that we should take care of them. Mr. Yunus says their plight is reversible. The question is how we can use ideas and methods of the latter to obey the commands of the former in a sustainable way.

Image: Soweto township, Johannesburg, South Africa; by Trevor Williams

New Year, New Ear

2010-01-10T21:45:00.007-05:00

For me, journals are altars, written monuments to the places and times when God has worked in unexplainable ways, either responding to faith or interrupting rebellion.

Though not as enduring or tough to construct as the stacks of stones the ancient Israelites used, my written remembrances provide the same thing: a store of faith that I can borrow against when God's presence and goodness aren't so obvious.

In January I considered writing a blog post about the new year, a wrap up of 2009 and a look ahead to 2010. I planned to make new resolutions, posting them on this blog and sharing them with friends as a way of keeping myself accountable.

Then I started thinking about what I wanted to accomplish this year, and it began to sound all too familiar: Study Chinese more. Read the Bible more. Pray more. Be there for my family more. Be a better husband. Get in shape. All of these "new" goals were leftovers from last year's to-do list. Was I really this lame? I felt busy this year, but was I just a hamster spinning on a wheel, getting some good cardio in but not moving anywhere?

Partly for reassurance and partly to divine how I could do so much but accomplish so little, I got out my 2009 journal. There were highlights, some funny stories, audacious events and signs that God's wisdom was at times really influencing my heart. But when I searched intently, there weren't all that many altars.

I decided to trace it back to 2008. The previous year's journal had a different array of events, most of them positive, but all woven together by a somewhat consistent cycle: a lack of discipline followed by a confession, followed by a brief period of faithfulness, followed by another setback. Same story for 2007. And the hamster wheel spins on.

I think God's getting tired of watching me run in place, so on New Year's day, he gave me a resolution of his own.

It came somewhere between Albany and Atlanta, on a straight highway with farms and forests on both sides. Katy and I were talking about the challenges this year would bring. How would we navigate them without veering off course? I know it's shocking to hear, but my wife and I don't always agree on everything. How could we reconcile our views and dreams, which sometimes tended to take off in opposite directions?

We decided that there was no way that we could do this on our own. The only way to wind up in the same place, and to keep holding hands along the way, was to meet up at the same signpost and follow a trail that neither one of us had charted for ourselves. We decided that our chosen route must be the one that winds along to the sound of God's voice. He would be the one that clears the path.

But there were some inherent problems before we could even take the first steps. We talk about following this voice all the time, but what does that practically mean? How do we really learn to hear the creator's whispers without psyching ourselves out or tricking ourselves into plotting our own course of action? These topics dominated our discussion as we drove to Columbus, where we would stop to chat with a friend and mentor.

We walked in the house and sat down by a blazing fire to catch up with the mentor on recent events. As is inevitable with this godly man, who seems specially appointed to speak wisdom into my life, we settled on God and his mysterious workings as a topic of conversation. Without any mention of our talks in the car, my friend (whom we call our personal prophet only half jokingly) entered into a discourse on deciphering the will of God. The thrust of the half-hour discussion and prayer? Learn how to hear God.

At this point, for once, God grabbed my attention, using a bit of humor and irony to drive home the point: I, like so many saints before me, had closed my ears to the one voice I professed to be the megaphone for my soul. While on Earth, Jesus always said, "He who has ears, let him hear." I've always had these curiously shaped sound-catchers on the sides of my head. Shouldn't that merit me some spiritual understanding? Apparently not. With all manner of humor and irony, God was speaking to me about hearing. He was revealing that I needed a different set of ears, a spiritual set, tuned only to the frequency within which his sweet voice falls softly.

I won't recount all the intricacies of the conversation or claim that I've made any significant strides toward my next destination, but I have realized what it takes to find the right path, to take the first steps toward the allure of his voice. It's simple, really. It starts with shutting up the part of me that screams like a spoiled child for authority, that whines when it can't see around the next bend, that complains when fatigue sets in. Only when we stop staring at our own feet will we see - and hear - where His path leads.

Giving Up the Quilted Community

2009-11-23T22:33:00.009-05:00

Technology's making it easier than ever to build a patchwork Christian community of friends and mentors from the past. But effective faith requires a present context, so in this age of transience, we've got to overcome our fear of new faces.

Sometimes I drive home from work earlier than usual or go in a little late. The latter happens much more often than the former, as my wife can attest, but either way the result is the same when the context changes: The world looks different.

In the thick of winter, I've grown accustomed to darkness on my 6:30 p.m. commute, so darting home during sunlight hours sometimes reveals a food shop or a tire repair center that I've passed each day but never noticed. On those days I feel like a foreigner in my own apartment complex. Everyone who gets off work at 5 is out and about, grabbing mail, walking dogs, taking strolls, even moving in.

Ah, moving. It seems to be the one constant in the life of my apartment complex. Every weekend at least one huge truck blocks the parking lot to drop off a few newcomers who strain to unpack the props they'll need for their next act on life's stage. They'll spend a year or two here finishing a master's or doctorate degree at Emory, working in a local restaurant, pursuing a musical career or climbing a few rungs on the career ladder at a local IT company. And then they'll be gone.

My time here is also limited, I'm pretty sure. In America, apartments, however luxurious, aren't considered the holy grail of housing. You can't exactly put up a picket fence around them, and it would just be plain difficult to squeeze a dog and three kids into this amount of square footage (not to mention that you'd be violating the lease agreement on multiple counts).

No, for most of us, these stacked boxes we call home are temporary storage units we share with our stuff as we hope and scrimp for something better. I've really enjoyed my time in the apartment, but I'd be lying if I said this is where I want to live out my days. Just like the student and the musician, both tied to this community by temporary goals or employment, no matter how long I want to stay here, I'm likely going to be transient.

Though I haven't yet moved, I can see the story repeating itself at the complex. I've had at least three across-the-hall neighbors and four different families living above me in the past two years.

Part of it's the nature of the times, I think. In the age of technology, fewer people are tied to the same employer, same town, same life for 30-50 years, as once was the case. People are going places, switching jobs and uprooting themselves for brand new careers with increasing regularity.

But despite the fact that folks are moving more often, it's not getting easier for folks to fit in when they move. That's especially true for believers looking for a place to live out God's kingdom in a new local context.

At least that's been my experience.

When I graduated college, finding a job was priority No. 1. I briefly considered a move to China but promptly remembered I was marrying a wife whose taste buds hadn't quite warmed to Peking duck.

I also thought about moving to the town where the in-laws live, but the journalism job there paid peanuts, which I really enjoy as a food, not so much as a unit of currency.

Things got crazy enough at one point that I even considered helping a pastor friend plant a church in Montana or joining a magazine start-up that I knew was doomed to failure, obscurity or some combination of the two.

In the end, when dust from all these schemes settled, God put me in Decatur, Ga., at the swirling center of an archipelago of friends, mentors and fathers of the faith spread throughout Georgia. I could reach UGA friends in Athens in an hour. I could see family in Columbus in two. Two of my best friends were in Augusta. I could reach anyone through a quick phone call or instant message, but accessing these lifelines through technology, or even knowing they were so close was different than actually sharing life with them. I could survive off of this patchwork community, this loose web of support, but only for awhile.

My wife and I slowly began easing into a church here in Decatur, but by my laziness, God's hand, or some combination of the two, it never felt like the right fit. We could never settle in, and with regard to Christian community, it just didn't feel right to supplant our faraway but familiar faces with strange new believers just because they were closer.

For me (and I think for Katy as well), moving was the first time we were required to really own our faith. In college I had built-in brothers. Accountability was a cinch: Hiding stuff from the folks sharing your pantry or battling you in 3 a.m. video game wars is pretty much impossible.

But moving into a new home in a new city with a new wife? That was unchartered territory. Working together, we had to find our niche, and I'm glad to say that through two years of searching and God's leading, we have, in a small church that is working to build disciples in a targeted area of the city. It's been a little awkward, and there's a long way to go, but we're slowly learning to live life with people we'd never seen just a few months ago.

It wasn't easy to make the transition, but the journey has led me to a conclusion that I think might be lost on others making a move: In the Facebook world, we can't let the temptation to hang on to past connections hinder our search for current community. Besides, if we start to miss the ones we leave behind, it's not too difficult to turn on a computer. A status update's just a few clicks away.

Ending the Drought - 1 New Post, 2 New Songs

2009-10-14T02:47:00.007-04:00

Wow. This blog has been fallow for way too long. A few months ago I posted on Twitter the fact that I should probably remove the word "blogger" from my profile in an effort toward truthfulness. The truth is, today marks a terrible inverted milestone that really hurts what little credibility I had as a blogger in the first place: It has been long three months since the last post here.

There is some good news in all this for the few folks out there who are into my music. My absence from the blogosphere hasn't been totally unproductive. Amid my ongoing work as a reporter and trips to South Korea, Maine, Costa Rica, Texas and Mississippi, I've been able to grind out two new songs.

Well, I say "new," but again, I should be truthful. It's evident by the subject matter of these songs that they were written quite awhile ago, but their journey from pen to paper to performance to recording has moved at a snail's pace. They both deal with times before I was married. Katy and I just celebrated our two-year anniversary in June, which should give you a clue as to how long it's been since I laid down some new tracks.

"Arizona" talks about the desire to get away from all the hullabaloo that comes along with getting married. Getting through all the well-intentioned but exhausting congratulations, the necessary but tedious preparations, is quite a feat, and I think guys (who don't relish the whole wedding process quite as much as our female counterparts) will especially relate to how ready I was to get away from the Georgia pines and off to the serenity of dusty Arizona, where Katy and I went for our honeymoon. Preview the song and download it here.

"Home to you" digs back even further in the Katy-Trevor saga, to the days when we were trying to make a long-distance relationship work. At that point, I was questioning whether all the miles were worth the waiting game that we had to play. Would a family emerge out of our endless driving and the striving? Was the relationship worth all the weekend trips, the gas money, the hurt of being apart five days per week? Looking back, I'm glad to say that it was, but things weren't always so clear. This song, I hope, captures the frustration of not knowing what lay at the end of the road we were traveling. Click here to preview and/or download it.

Both songs are free. The quality's not astounding. These were done in my home studio, so let me know how I can improve. I'm an OK writer but a terrible producer. Hopefully I won't go three more months before making more noise on this blog.

How to Navigate Seoul's Metro System

2009-07-14T10:00:00.003-04:00

I might as well have been looking at the control panel for a NASA space shuttle when I stared down a subway kiosk on the outskirts of Washington D.C.

It didn't take much to confuse me at this point. On Wednesday, a 13-hour flight had brought me home from South Korea. On Thursday, we packed up and left Atlanta for D.C. During the all-night drive, my jet lag was an advantage: The 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. shift? No problem.

But now it was Friday. Sleep-deprivation had caught up with me. And if the fatigue wasn't enough to muddle my brain, the puzzle of buttons, fare charts, digital instructions, money receptacles and receipt dispensers on the D.C. metro kiosk finished the job.

I wasn't the only one struggling. At 10 a.m., travelers were already pouring into town for Fourth of July celebrations. Everyone who arrived at the Greenbelt station needed instructions, and they looked haplessly to a lone attendant who, judging by his palpably annoyed state, had spent his entire morning dealing with ignorant tourists.

In the end, I left with two tickets in hand, one each for my wife and me, but the process wasn't easy. First I had to find the reduced holiday rate on the chart above the kiosk. Then I had to select a pass or single fare card. Next I had to choose the quantity of fare cards and the value of each. The machine's configuration was mind-numbing. With no automation, I had to add up the total fare in my head. And there were no numbered buttons. The fare simply started at $20.00, and I had to use what looked like a white plastic light switch to toggle all the way down to $4.70.

At this point, I really began to miss South Korea.

Compared to D.C.'s, the metro system in Seoul is a breath of fresh air. English is available at all kiosks, most of which have bright, intuitive touchscreens that make the ticket-buying process quite simple. In Korea, I could recheck the destination on my map, write down some notes, buy the ticket, retrieve my change and head to the turnstile faster than I could figure out how to simply work the machine in Washington.

Of course, your ability to navigate any subway will be directly related to prior experience. If you've never negotiated the pulsating, bullish crowds, the labyrinthine tunnels, the oft-confounding ticketing systems, your first time will likely be more of a crash course than a joyride. I've ridden subways in Hong Kong, Paris, Shanghai, D.C. and Atlanta, and the experience undoubtedly helped me in Seoul.

With more preparation, Korea would've been even easier, so I'm offering a few words of advice for those who might be planning a trip. I'm no expert, so more experienced folks, please feel free to correct or augment what follows.

Getting on

Seoul proper has nearly 11 million people, and the city claims that about half South Korea's population - more than 24 million - live in or commute to its metro area. Those numbers prove that the moving around this city will mean trial by fire for the first-time subway rider.

It sounds simple, but I've found that half the battle is knowing where you're going and being prepared. I recommend grabbing a metro map at the airport and studying the 10 lines during the hour-long bus ride into Seoul from the airport in Incheon. That way you'll at least have an idea how to hit the ground running upon arriving at the hotel. I really don't have any tips on how to best read a subway map. It's mostly just instinct, experience and most importantly, attention to detail.

Find the nearest subway station to your hotel. Any will do, but if you're at a confluence of different lines, consulting a map first could help you pick a line with a quicker route to your final stop.

With your destination in mind, stroll up to the kiosk. If you're an English speaker, you'll have no problem seeing the ENG button at the bottom of the screen, a stark sight in a sea of Korean. I'm assuming if you're reading this you're an English speaker, but just note that Korean and English are the only two languages offered at the kiosks. I saw some Japanese girls and a Chinese couple having to use English to select their destination on the digital screen, although the paper map I got from the airport listed stops in Chinese and Japanese.

After you select English, you'll have to choose what type of fare you want. I chose "single journey" every time, although if I were staying longer I could've loaded up a T-money card. Even buying single fares, the metro is considerably cheaper than in most American cities. It cost me just a little more than a dollar for a one-way fare that allowed me to traverse the city.

Once you've tapped a ticket type, many of the most popular stops will flash up on the screen. If yours doesn't appear, click the letter(s) the stop's name begins with, and an alphabetical list will come up. You're not bound to this particular stop if you change your mind during the ride. The machine just uses your stop to calculate your fare. If you disembark at a different destination, make a visit to the clearly labeled "fare adjustment machine" to pay what you owe or get your change, whatever the case may be.

Note also that your fare will include a 500-won deposit to cover the cost of the orange metro card in case you don't return it. After you get off, make sure to take your card to the "Deposit Refund Device." Slide it into the slot, and take the 500-won coin that drops down into the coin return. While 500 won doesn't seem like much - it's less than USD $0.50 - the cost adds up after double-digit subway rides. Get in the habit of getting your deposit back, and it won't be a problem.

Finding Direction

After scanning your newly acquired orange fare card and passing through the turnstile, the next order of business is to figure out which way to go. This is crunch time. Deciding which train will mean the difference between being late or on time. It's tough at first, because the Seoul metro maps and signs don't give you cardinal directions like east or west. They list a smattering of stops pointed toward each of the lines moving in opposite directions.

I devised a sort of scheme to deal with this. The ideal situation is to see your stop on the sign, but that won't happen if you're transferring down the line or getting off at a lesser-known stop. This is another reason it's important to have a map handy. You'll have to match the unfamiliar words on the sign with the unfamiliar words on the map to see which ones correlate with the direction of your final stop. This is one of the toughest parts of navigating the metro, as the choice between one direction and another often must be made in a split second with people rushing, tones blaring and doors sliding shut. Not to mention that the names on the signs, though transliterated, can sometimes begin to look and sound the same to foreign eyes and ears.

And now to my non-foolproof system: I quickly check my destination on my map and scan for the next and last stops in that direction. I also look for any potential landmarks in between. Stadiums, shopping districts, universities and tourist sites all generally make the cut.

The Ride

So you're through the sliding doors, out of the stifling heat that hangs in the subway corridors and into the quiet, air-conditioned comfort of the train. And hopefully you've picked the train moving in the right direction.

Now what? If it's not crowded, slide into a seat, but be sure not to take one of those designated for the elderly.

Once you're seated, the ride is pretty easy. Just don't expect many people to talk to you. I had a few benevolent souls speak to me, but mostly I just kept to myself. Others will be doing the same. For the most part, everyone will be engrossed in whatever content their cell phone is feeding them at the time: TV, texting, conversation, Web surfing. It's all on the table. And the people who aren't engaging in one of those activities are holding the phone in their hand, poised to pounce at the next chance for conversation.

Memorize your stop and its corresponding number, and you can chill a little, especially if it's a long way away. Announcements in English and Korean, along with a festive little recorded song, warn passengers as each stop approaches. It's smooth sailing from here, but keep checking the maps as you pass each stop. Leaving mental breadcrumbs will help build a map in your head that will make this process easy to replicate on the way back.

Getting out

Getting out of the subway isn't hard. Mostly you just follow the signs that say "Way Out" in English.

But picking the right way can be tricky. Subway stops often double as underground crosswalks. Exits are numbered, and each one will usually spit you out on one of the four corners created by intersection. The key again is to know ahead of time which way you need to walk once you get above ground. If you know that as well as the appropriate road to follow, convenient maps on the wall will help you find your way.

Other issues:

1. Dealing with crowds - Like most Asian countries, the violent crime rate in Korea is pretty low. But just because you likely won't get mugged, don't assume that you won't get robbed. Without being paranoid, be aware that valuables are called such for a reason. Take care of them. Keep bags in front of you, and watch out when the crowds really begin to press in.

2. Entertainment - There are actually lots of things to do on the subway if you're creative. My favorite? Watch people. Also you can watch TV on the phone of the person sitting next to you. Read or take notes. Study your map. Notice the personalities of the different subway stops. Count the number of people talking on cell phones.

There's always the occasional alms-seeking entertainer, too. At one stop, I saw a South American guy playing an assortment of flutes from the Andes and selling his CDs. On one train, a blind man walked through with an outstretched hand, playing "Take it to the Lord in Prayer" on a harmonica.

3. More Resources - This isn't the definitive guide. The Korea Tourism Web site has some great information that I haven't covered. More resources are linked below:

-Apps with maps - Seoul metro on your iPhone or iPod touch
-Interactive map with all major Korean cities' metro lines
-Click the Seoul metro map above to see a full-size version

Video of Andean flute player:

Anybody out there got any words of wisdom, disagreements to add?

Uighur Watching

2009-07-12T23:01:00.008-04:00

The world's spotlight is now on China's wild northwest, where ethnic tensions came to a head last week in a conflict that left nearly 200 dead and thousands injured in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province.

The tragic events have given me some clarity. While backpacking through the region in summer 2006, I was detained and interrogated five different times by police. With another example of the region's volatility, I have a little bit better idea why.

Xinjiang is the ancestral homeland of nearly 10 million Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who make up about half of the region's population. Although the province is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the minority Uighurs have expressed resentment over increasing Han encroachment on what they see as their territory, known as East Turkestan to those bold enough to promote the region's autonomy.

The Han Chinese have been migrating into Xinjiang over the last several years to seize opportunities in the resource-rich region. The central government has enacted policies and programs encouraging this westward expansion, some say in an effort to dilute Uighur influence and exert more control over the region. The Han are China's largest ethnic group, making up about 90 percent of the country's population. Uighurs have complained that the benefits of economic development in the province - which makes up about a sixth of China's landmass - haven't been fairly shared.

China has had more than a few reminders that Xinjiang is a stick of dynamite waiting to be lit. Last year, two of Uighur assailants ambushed a Chinese police unit in the border town of Kashgar, killing 16 a month before the Beijing Olympic Games. (News reports called into question the validity of the official account)

Last week's spark occurred when a group of Uighurs - some put the number at nearly 1,000 - gathered to express dissatisfaction for Chinese government inaction in the killing of two Uighur workers by Han Chinese during a brawl at a factory in faraway Guangdong province. The Urumqi protests grew violent when Chinese police tried to disperse the crowd.

After the Uighurs ran wild, thousands of Han sought revenge and took to the streets with sticks, knives and other implements. When the dust settled, more than 180 people were dead, most of them Han, according to Chinese government propaganda. Uighur activists claim that hundreds of Uighurs were shot and killed during the police backlash. The Chinese government has not confirmed that, nor will it. The latest figures put the number arrested for their roles in the riots at 1,400, and some are reporting that Uighur men are being rooted from their homes.

The Chinese government would like nothing more than to pin this on "separatist" elements. In fact, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang has already blamed Rebiya Kadeer, the world's foremost Uighur activist, for fomenting the unrest. Last year, during the assault on the Chinese police patrol, the government played the "terrorist" card, saying that those who committed the acts must've been Islamic extremists.

Perhaps because of their Islamic beliefs and relative obscurity, the Uighurs' cause has not been celebrated as heartily as that of Tibetans and other oppressed peoples. The Chinese government says that it gives Uighurs ample opportunities. Uighurs feel disenfranchised. I have to say that if not for my experiences in Xinjiang, I might be tempted to believe the Xinhua (Chinese state media) version of events.

But this conflict runs pretty deep, and it has a political root, as most so-called "ethnic" conflicts do. The Qing dynasty conquered Xinjiang in the 1870s, and since then the Uighurs have mounted a variety of struggles - bombings, shootings, rebellions and demonstrations - to shirk Chinese rule. In the 1940s, they succeeded for five short years, when the East Turkestan Republic blossomed as the Communist and Nationalist forces were battling for control of the mainland. When Mao Ze Dong came to power in 1949, he sent the People's Liberation Army to bring the western provinces back under Chinese control. The Uighurs submitted without a fight.

The Chinese government issued a report in 2002 blaming Uighurs for 200 separate terrorist incidents during the first few years of 21st century. The claim was made the year after 9/11, when President Bush laid down America's "for-us-or-against-us" gauntlet with regard to the fight against terrorism. China quickly sided with the U.S., stating its commitment to quelling terrorist activities within its borders. But some think that China’s claim of allegiance to the U.S.-led war against terror is a façade meant to legitimize the brutal suppression of anti-Chinese sentiments in Xinjiang. When Uighur prisoners got out of the Guantanamo Bay prison facilities last month, the U.S. would not repatriate them to China for fear they would be killed or harassed. Instead, the small Pacific island nation of Palau and the Atlantic island of Bermuda took the Uighurs in, with much backlash from their populations.

The bottom line in all this is that the Chinese government wants economic control of the northwest. The Uighurs want more autonomy, less encroachment. It's sad to say, but despite the best efforts for cultural understanding on both sides, these ideologies clash and will inevitably result in friction in the future, much like the tumultuous 20th century. Let's just hope subsequent struggles won't be as fierce as last week's.

More resources:

My recent article on Coke's new bottling plant in Xinjiang

See also: A View of Pre-Olympic Tensions in Xinjiang

Daily Bread Deja Vu

2009-06-08T12:09:00.005-04:00

A third short story from one of my Asia mission trips has been posted on the International Mission Board's East Asia field blog.

It's been three years since I went on a mission trip in that part of the world, but God has kept the memories fresh. I hope to continue putting down on paper (or blogs, as the case may be) all the amazing experiences He's allowed me to have.

Click here to check out the story about meeting a friendly face while walking through a rainforest park in southern China.

This post will link you to the other two stories the East Asia blog has published, as well as a chronological list of entries from my 2006 trip.

Lessons from the First Swedish Woman to Climb Everest

2009-06-07T11:49:00.004-04:00

It's a rare privilege to talk to some who's summited Everest, rarer still to meet someone that has some superlative attached to their feats on the mountain.

Renata Chlumska, a renowned 36-year-old Swedish adventurer, became the first woman from her country ever to reach the roof of the world in 1999. She was slated to come speak in Georgia two weeks after my Sweden trip, and I was going to interview her in Malmo.

She was headed to Hungary the next day and couldn't make it to meet me, so we spoke by phone instead.

Though Everest is her claim to fame, I found out that her speech was actually going to cover her Around America Adventure in 2005-06, when she kayaked and biked around the perimeter of the lower 48 states. This year is the 10th anniversary of her initial Everest summit, and it's now "old news," she joked.

Adventurers have to tout their accomplishments. It's how they make their living, whether they're motivational speakers whose value is in their unique perspective or expedition leaders who need to brand themselves as trusted guides for extreme outdoor trips. (Chlumska is both.)

What struck me as I talked to her is how she believes that challenges on the mountain are similar to those we face in life, without the blistering cold, physical exhaustion, struggle for oxygen and altitude sickness, of course.

"For me, being tired, going through hardship, when it's painful, your body hurts and you're drained mentally and physically, that's not the reason to turn back. That's just part of the challenge," she told me.

That was so refreshing for my American ears to hear. Our culture worships comfort and ease and values convenience, not discipline.

For Chlumska, overcoming hardship - valuing the destination over the discomfort in getting there - is part of gaining a new perspective that sets you above the crowd.

"You just get a different view when you climb a mountain or hill or tree," she said. " You just get to see a different angle."

It's the same way in faith.

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. -Jesus, Luke 9:23.

A Southerner in South Sweden

2009-06-06T10:58:00.006-04:00

I know I keep saying this, but for someone whose international travel experience is mainly in China, it's really easy to become mesmerized by Europe. That sounds almost counter intuitive, because some would argue that the culture in Europe is so similar to the U.S.

Here's what I mean, though. China's a vast country, almost a continent in its own right, just like the United States. I've traversed it from east to west, examining all kinds of cultures in interior provinces and border regions. But no matter how exotic the locale or how many miles I travel, I'm always in the same country.

Contrast that with Europe, where nations rub elbows with each other. Especially with the EU's paper-thin borders, you can cross with hardly any indication that you've left one country and entered another.

That was my feeling when my Sweden-bound train crossed the Oresund, the strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. Since a bridge linked the two sides about a decade ago, the southern region of Sweden, called Skane, has become tied to Copenhagen's metropolitan area. It makes sense economically, considering the fact that Stockholm is six or seven hours away by train or car.

A Day in Malmo

My first stop was the capital of Skane, a city called Malmo. It has a quarter-million people and lies right on the Oresund. My host, whom I had just contacted on Skype that Sunday morning, would meet me at the Malmo South station. From Copenhagen's center, it was only 15-20 minutes away.

Nils Eric Svensson, an economic development official with quite possibly the most Scandinavian name ever, stood with the hint of a smile on his face as I disembarked. A tall man with piercing blue eyes and some of the biggest hands you've ever seen, I had met him at our office in Georgia over a year ago. We didn't realize it until we finally saw each other. He helped me stuff my bags into his Volvo wagon, which along with the Saab wagon could compete for the title of Sweden's flagship vehicle.

He took me on a driving tour of Malmo. If Nils could be believed, the city was being transformed by an emphasis on the knowledge economy, logistics and environmental technologies. We passed a huge new IKEA facility, a new subway tunnel under construction and a 50,000-seat sports arena on our way to downtown.

As we drove, Nils gave me an abridged look at Malmo's nearly 1,000-year history. The city was established in the 1100s, when what is now southern Sweden was a part of the Danish kingdom. Malmo was originally called "Elbow" because of the shape of the nearby harbor. It has a long maritime history that led to its ascension as a shipbuilding center with a thriving wharf industry earlier in the 20th century. When the construction of ships moved largely to places like South Korea, some of Malmo's large wharfs closed down, leaving thousands jobless and the city with an identity crisis. For Malmo, it was a fork in the road, and from the tale that Nils was spinning, the city chose the right direction. "I've been working in and close to this area for all my time, but I have never experienced a development like we have now," he said.

Many of the wharf buildings, steel factories and old buildings now house companies that make devices for steering ships, clean technology applications, animation for mobile phones and other products that represent an about-face from the city's industrial history. As if to cap the transition, in 2001 construction began on the Turning Torso, a lonely 55-story skyscraper with a unique twisting design. It towers over the harbor and the shorter buildings around it. The Torso replaced the huge Kockums crane that stood as the city's iconic structure in the harbor during the wharf days. On a clear day Nils said it could be seen from 100 kilometers away. Along with the jobs, it too was shipped to South Korea in 2002, symbolizing a clean break with the past.

Where Are They Hiding?

If Malmo had 250,000 people, I wondered where they were hiding. It was a cool, overcast, blustery Sunday, so I assumed many people might be at church or staying indoors. The city was quiet with no semblance of hustle or bustle. Over lunch, Nils said the lack of activity had more to do with the season than religious fervor. In a land dotted with centuries-old churches and universities, not many people make a weekly habit of attending services, he said. It was the beginning of April, and everyone was waiting for the weather to fully change. Then they'd be out in force, walking along the water and taking advantage of the shift from harsh winter to temperate spring.

After lunch in Malmo, Nils drove me up to Lund, an old town with a huge university with a strong research sector that has attracted many high-tech companies. On the way, the green landscape impressed me. We were close to a relatively large city, but the four-lane highway still felt remote. Unlike in America, Sweden doesn't allow billboards to dot every piece of pasture land along the side of the road. We occasionally passed giant, white wind turbines.

Nils said that Malmo residents joke that their Danish friends on the other side of the Oresund strait never get any sunsets because they're facing east. After lunch, Nils and I had about five more hours until darkness fell. I didn't want to take too much of his time, so we went to his downtown office to conduct a video interview I'd put on my company's Web site.

I was talking to him about his region's plans for the upcoming Swedish Entrepreneurial Days conference in Savannah. Tragically, two weeks later, Nils was killed when a truck hit him while he was crossing a street in Savannah. The day before his death, Nils told me at the conference that he was enjoying a sort of vacation in Georgia's oldest city. It was his fifth visit. There was no way of knowing that my interview with him in Malmo would be his last media appearance.

I left Malmo with a deep respect for Nils, enriched by his Swedish brand of Southern Hospitality. With no real benefit for himself, he had taken three hours out of his day off to show a nosey reporter around his city. For me, he turned what could've been a wasted day into an opportunity.

On to Vaxjo

Nils dropped me off a Malmo's train station, a beautiful old brick building that looked and felt similar to the one in Copenhagen. An army of bicycles were parked outside, and gulls fluttered around the structure, which stood in stark red contrast to the bright blue sky. Nils told me Danish architecture had inspired many of the structures in Malmo, and the town hall proved him right. It was situated on a square and looked like a smaller model of the one in Copenhagen.

It only took about 20 minutes for my train to arrive. I boarded and sat down facing east, the direction I would ride for two hours before reaching my next destination.

Vaxjo has branded itself as the "greenest city in Europe." The city takes pride in its quest to totally eliminate CO2 emissions, an effort it began in the mid-1990s. At least according to government leaders, its environmental focus really started long before that, when city officials decided in the late 1960s to clean up its polluted lakes.

While Vaxjo has failed to meet its ambitious CO2 reduction goals, it has reduced emissions by more than 30 percent since the early 1990s. The key to that has been the use of renewable energy sources to provide more than 90 percent of the heating energy. Like Georgia, Sweden has a wealth of forestry resources that it's trying to monetize further as nations form new policies toward green energy.

If you like nightlife, Vaxjo is probably not your place. Maybe it's just Sundays, but when I stepped out of my hotel at 9 p.m., there were very few downtown establishments open. I tried to resist being a fat American, but the choices for dinner were limited to a McDonald's and a questionable pizza place. I went with the tried-and-true golden arches and then retired to the hotel.

The next day was a flash of green. A Vaxjo university professor picked me up at the hotel and drove me around for awhile, showing me the advances the city has made in building environmentally friendly apartments and houses made almost entirely from timber that boasts elevated insulation capabilities that reduce the need for heating in winter.

We then went to the school and did video interviews about possible collaboration between Vaxjo University and the Savannah College of Art & Design. A publisher of an environmental magazine came in to talk to me about partnering with our international business news Web site. I then visited a company that makes kits to transform gas-powered cars into flex-fuel vehicles. Finally, I went to city hall, where Vaxjo's executive mayor laid out reason that his city has become so green-conscious: To create jobs, boost quality of life, and help Vaxjo make its name known on the international stage.

Vaxjo is more than just green energy, though. There'll soon be a glass museum showing off the city's history as a glass/crystal capital. There are great shops, a museum dedicated to the Swedish mass migration to America, and of course, some old churches and buildings. Not to mention that I was now in Smaland, the birthplace of Ingvar Kamprad's IKEA, the furniture giant that has swept the world.

I ate a quick dinner and headed back to the train station. My two-day whirlwind tour of southern Sweden was over almost as soon as it had begun. It was two hours back to the Danish capital. I grabbed a scarce room at a hotel near the Copenhagen central station. My first European tour ended the next day.

Photos - Doors of Denmark

2009-05-27T01:17:00.009-04:00

Denmark is the door to Scandinavia from the European continent. Here's a sampling of the doors that grace historical buildings around Copenhagen:

The gate to Tivoli. It was closed for renovations on the day I was there.The door to the country at Kastrup Airport.

24 Hours in Copenhagen

2009-05-20T00:48:00.013-04:00

I didn't have long to make my mark on Denmark, so I started early. My flight landed in Copenhagen, the capital, around 10 a.m. I was still a little tired from getting to Charles de Gaulle airport at just after 6 to catch my early flight from Paris.

I read the Wall Street Journal (in a very airplane-friendly tabloid format) for most of the two-hour flight, but I looked out the window in time to see wind turbines standing starkly in the Copenhagen harbor, their crisp white contrasting with the blue of the sea. I wasn't even on the ground, and the city was already starting to live up to its reputation as a hub for alternative energy.

Denmark was not my destination. It was merely a way point, a place to pass through en route to Sweden, but I was excited. There was no way I was going to let a new country go to waste.

Lakes were everywhere reflecting the light of the late morning, and the land was awash in green and blue. Touchdown was smooth. Kastrup Airport was nice, clean and very modern. The first sign that greeted me when I exited the terminal said "Wi-fi Zone." This validated something else I had heard, that Denmark is one of the most wired countries in the world and one of the top places for information technology.

I didn't have to wait long to try out the country's IT infrastructure. After grabbing my bags, I walked to an electronic kiosk to book a train ticket into the city.

Luckily the instructions were in English as well as Danish. A British lady was struggling with the machine when I came up. I tried it out and had no problem until I entered my credit card. The transaction looked like it was going to clear until the screen asked for a PIN. I had never used a PIN with that credit card in the U.S., but the machine would not be reasoned with. I used my debit card instead and felt lucky that I had brought it with me. This wasn't the last time the PIN problem would crop up.

I had no problem finding the right train. It wasn't too crowded when I hopped on. No one made eye contact. A short American guy was making out with his tall, blonde Scandinavian girlfriend the whole way to the central station, Kobenhavn H. My giant red suitcase impeded movement; otherwise I would've turned away. Their public affection displays made me a part sick, part homesick. I'd been away from my wife for a week, the longest time we'd been apart since we married nearly two years ago.

The central station is a large brick building just across a street called Bernsdorffsgade from the famous Tivoli Gardens. It had a McDonald's and other restaurants and shops, but like the airport, the train station was a bit more quaint than you'd expect from a capital city. Of course, Denmark only has 5.4 million people and Copenhagen less than half that, so the whole place, while undoubtedly cosmopolitan and far from sleepy, has a refreshingly laid-back feel.

Come to think of it, while Paris has the (some say) ghastly 59-floor Montparnasse Tower as its lonely modern skyscraper, I couldn't find one in the Danish capital. That's not to say it's not a modern city, but it is free what some would call tall architectural sins that most shiny new western metropolises have committed in the name of progress and population density.

I took a left out of the train station's main entrance and traced Tivoli's eastern edge. An information sign led me to a tourist center on the corner of Bernsdorffsgade and Vesterbrogade, where I nabbed a map. I'd booked my hotel the night before but hadn't bothered to get directions, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I knew finding it would force me to be resourceful. (Of course, it's hard to be adventurous for long when you're rolling a 45-lb. piece of luggage over cobblestone streets.)

The map led me to the Radhuspladsen (town hall square). After just a few minutes of walking, I looked up to see my aptly named hotel, The Square, overlooking the sprawling paved plaza that spread out in front of the Radhus, the beautiful old town hall.

I claimed my room at the hotel. The nice blonde attendant told me someone had left me a message at the front desk. This made me feel important, and more than that, relieved. A representative from the Danish Energy Agency would meet me for an interview in about half an hour. I love traveling, but doing so alone and without a context honestly isn't very fulfilling. This interview would give me a job to do and a friendly face to help me make sense of this new city.

While I awaited Peter's arrival, I settled into my tiny room overlooking the square. I hooked the ethernet cable into my computer to start using the first truly free Internet I'd encountered in Europe. I gave myself a mental pat on the back for choosing a netbook that had an ethernet port despite temptations to go with a cheaper model without one.

I pulled up Skype and called another interview prospect, a businessman who had spent five years in Georgia as head of Denmark's trade commission here. He was beginning a weeklong vacation from work, but instead of traveling to exotic locales, he was spending it working on the garden behind his 100-year-old yellow cottage. I tried to tell him I wouldn't trouble him, but he insisted I come for coffee. In half an hour, I had already made two appointments.

I met Peter downstairs. I expected an older man, but I got a tall, thin Dane who looked to be in his late twenties and spoke perfect English with a slight British tinge. He downplayed his English, saying he needed to polish it if he ever wanted a job at the EU. He had hard eyes and features. His brown hair had slight waves. We went for a quick lunch at an artisan sandwich place that showed me Danish food might give the French a little competition. The busy clerk wouldn't accept my American card. "Only Danish," she said in a disapproving tone. I was embarrassed as my new friend had to pick up the 50-kroner (about $10) tab.

Peter and I ducked out of the small shop and took our sandwiches to a bench near one of the city's many canals, just around the corner from the Danish parliament building. We talked about biofuels and climate change, and how Denmark is trying to add to its alternative energy portfolio. The country already generates a fifth of its electric power through wind energy. This December Copenhagen will host what some are calling the new Kyoto, the U.N. Conference on Climate Change.

After a nice interview, I hit the ATM to pay Peter back and get cash for my cab ride out to the suburbs. Peter left me with a Serbian taxi driver who'd been in Copenhagen for 20 years. The ride was only 15 minutes, but it cost me the equivalent of $25, a ridiculously high price for someone who's traveled mostly in China, where cab fares seem to be cheaper than the cost of the gas that propelled the vehicle to your destination. I made a mental note to take the bus or train back to the center of town.

I arrived at Kent's home about 20 minutes after 3. His wife saw the cab drop me off and met me at the front gate. She led me to the backyard, past a few apple trees, some berry bushes and across lush green grass to a patio where Kent was sitting. The coffee in the carafe was still hot even though I was 20 minutes late. He poured me some, and we began talking. He asked me how our publication was doing and gave me a detailed description of Atlanta as an international city and what the state of Georgia needs to do to attract more global businesses.

Afterward, he took me back to the city and dropped me off at the hotel. With the appointments over, it was time to explore. I walked out toward Norrebro, an area of the city the tourist map told me had thriving ethnic populations and a lot of antiques. It sounded like a place to get my cultural fix while finding a great souvenir for my wife.

Heading north, I crossed over a canal that Kent said used to be a moat a thousand years ago when Copenhagen was a fortress. When I stopped to take some pictures of the giant swans in the water, a Romanian lady came up to chat with me. Miruna was carrying her baby in front of her in a sling. She was married to a Dane, but she couldn't speak Danish and he couldn't speak Romanian. They communicate in English. A sad soul, she seemed amused to have a foreigner to speak frankly with about the difficulties of Danish life. The place is tough for foreigners. Some say it's difficult to even get a cell phone contract there without citizenship. Miruna had been jumping through hoops in hopes of gaining citizenship, but the process was taking its toll on their family. She was looking forward to a trip to her homeland to visit relatives.

We parted, and I walked forever looking for a place to eat. South Asians offered kebabs. Middle Easterners sold vegetables at streetside stands. A surprising amount of Seven Elevens tempted me with convenience store goodies. Trendy bars and pubs attracted local crowds. I passed all these up, thinking I'd find something better and more affordable. Food is expensive in Denmark. Beers are upwards of $8 and a good meal can set you back $30 easily. To put it in perspective, know that value meals at the Copenhagen's trendy McDonald's cost $10-$13. I wanted to marry atmosphere with affordability, but it didn't look promising.

I stopped at a candy store for a psychological boost and that high that comes with consuming way too many Swedish fish and strips of sour candy. The stash (I bought it by the pound) lasted until I crossed over the moat and back to the central shopping district. I found a pub offering a a real hamburger, Coca-Cola and fries for $16, a steal compared to Burger King's $13 meal.

After a lonely meal capping a long day, I screwed up the exchange rate and gave the waitress an $8 tip, equivalent to 50 percent of the cost of the meal. At that point I knew it was time to go to bed. Sweden was just across the Oresund, the body of water that separates the two countries. Another country was just one bridge away.

Photos: City scenes, from top to bottom: The old Town Hall building, Tivoli entrance, Copenhagen canal, Danish doors.

Video below: Get a good glimpse of the front of the central train station in my video explaining that Tivoli is closed:

Home Sweet Hotel - European vs. American Lodging

2009-05-15T01:28:00.001-04:00

Appreciating American convenience after eight nights in seven European hotels

The hours of ironing, the meticulous folding, the careful closure of the suitcase and the cautious slide of the zipper: None of it mattered. When I pulled my suits, shirts and slacks out of the giant red bag I'd brought to Europe, it was clear that I'd need drastic measures to smooth out these pesky wrinkles.

An iron! I thought. My boss was paying more than a hundred dollars for this cramped room in France; certainly they would offer the courtesy of such a mundane device.

I slid open the door to the room's makeshift closet, and they were all there - the whole array of hotel laundry tools - suit hangers with clips, a bar to hang ties on, a full-length mirror. Still, though, no iron.

But I did see something intriguing. It looked like some sort of black, vertically rectangular George Foreman grill mounted on the wall. Its brown cord was loosely attached to an electrical outlet that didn't have the third hole for the grounding prong. I looked at the device quizzically, opening and closing it like the jaws of a toothless, plastic alligator's mouth. The red button on top begged to be pushed. Next to it, I read the words, "Trouser press."

It turns out that the device was pretty intuitive. You slide a pant leg through, fold the press into place, lock it and press the red button. It begins to breathe heat to both sides until your pants become like the buns of a panini being toasted. At least in my hotels in France, Denmark and Sweden, the trouser press gave off enough heat to give that few blissful seconds of leg warmth after putting on the pants, but not enough to actually remove many wrinkles.

And then you have the more obvious problem of what to do now that you have semi-presentable pants and a shirt that looks like it's been through a war. The trouser press is a limited tool, and try as often and as awkwardly as I might, it just wasn't made for pressing shirts.

The trouser press wasn't my only issue with European hotels. In an eight-day trip across France, Denmark and Sweden, I stayed in seven different hotels. It became clear that those frequented by our European friends are not always endowed with the same inalienable conveniences that a lot of American hotels promise.

Take the bathrooms, for instance. Call me lazy, but after a shower I don't enjoy having to walk back down the hallway toward the entryway to go to the bathroom. That's right, my American readers. The toilet in some French hotels is kept in an entirely separate room from the shower, sink and tub. Imagine a coat closet to your left as you walk into your foyer. Now imagine there's a toilet in it. That's just how it is, without the coat rack, of course. And just like a coat closet, there inevitably is no fan in this little restroom. (After all my travels to China, you'd think I'd be grateful for any toilet you can actually rest your behind on, but I digress.)

There are in Europe, however, two separate settings for toilet flushing - a big button and a small one on the wall - which I did find very useful. As a lazy environmentalist, I'm a bit sad that somehow this effortless water-saving adaptation hasn't made its way to the States on a broader scale.

The inconveniences in the Euro hotels didn't end in the bathroom, though, and some nifty flushing gadget couldn't blind me to other shortcomings. After I finished showering, I'd want to chat with my wife. Without a cell phone, I'd use Skype to call home. Skype requires the Internet, so I generally had to either buy three hours of connection for a decent 10-euro price or get gouged for one hour at five euros. This would've been OK at five-star hotels, but everyone knows - well, at least the owners of Quality, Comfort and LaQuinta Inns do - that inexpensive hotels should have free Internet. That's just the way the world should work.

Because of my indignance, I'd refuse the one-hour trap and get suckered into spending three hours talking, twittering, reading and writing. Then I'd need to sleep, which brings me to my next beef with European hotels:

They have no alarm clocks.

People who know me know that alarm clocks are No. 4 on my version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - food, clothing, shelter, and alarms to remind me to wake up and go after all of the above.

That said, I like to think I'm a relatively savvy traveler, so I realize that it's ultimately my fault if I don't have an alarm clock that will wake me up. I actually have two that I accidentally left at home. The blame is all mine, I admit.

That didn't change the fact that in Sweden and Denmark I had to stuff my Timex watch into my ear canal to make sure that its measly alarm took the edge off of the sleep before the automated wakeup call came from a muted phone came at the programmed time.

Contrast this with my experience in Savannah, Ga., during a business trip two weeks after returning from Sweden. Not only did I have an alarm clock with two separate alarms, noise settings and snooze buttons, but I also had a personalized wakeup call from the clerk at the front desk. When I didn't answer on the first try, she called back to make sure I was awake, and she even acted cheerful about it! I couldn't believe it.

This post isn't intended to rag on European hotels. I had a great time listening to the nightlife out my window at the aptly named Square hotel on Copenhagen's old city. I had an even better time getting to know the joys of the coffee offered as part of a "city breakfast" at the bar in a Parisian Novotel.

As Bill Bryson so humorously showed me in "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," a collection of essays on returning to the U.S. after 20 years in the U.K., America is a wonderful land, but our excessive quest for convenience doesn't always make the most sense if we look at it with fresh eyes.

Then again, as my wife would say, why would we be looking introspectively our habits when we could be watching the Hallmark Channel on our American hotel's wall-mounted flatscreen?

A serious tip: If you're traveling in Europe, especially Denmark, make sure you have at least one credit card that is PIN-activated. I've never used a PIN on my Visa in America, but they demanded one when I was buying train tickets and hotel rooms. Good thing I had my debit card too. Anyone have any thoughts on whether there's a way to get around the PIN requirement in these places?

Living Watermelons - An East Asia Missions Story

2009-05-05T15:29:00.007-04:00

A short story from one of my China mission trips appeared on the International Mission Board's East Asia field blog today.

On a backpacking expedition in 2005, a travel companion and I shared some watermelons and a poignant 15 minutes with a peasant family at a roadside hut. Without speaking our language, they communicated hospitality to us, even though we were strangers intruding on their land.

I pray that their kindness returns to them in the form of eternal life through the Gospel. Read the story here.

See all my blog entries from that trip here.

Photo: We left a gospel VCD on this well, the water god's doorstep.

My Music Featured on YUDU.com

2009-04-20T09:54:00.004-04:00

I'm not a professional musician. I don't make money by playing my guitar and singing. I don't even proclaim to be that good at the music I do make. But, if I'm going to make it, I'd really like someone to hear it. A mute musician is no good to anyone.

I guess a bad musician could be worse than a mute, but I'd like to think I'm not that terrible. Apparently YUDU doesn't think so either, to my surprise.

YUDU is a service that allows artists, writers, musicians and publications to publish digital content in a variety of forms on the Internet, saving trees and presenting a new option for people and organizations anxious to share their content with the world without the upfront costs and hassles of creating a print product (or a CD, in my case).

I'm using it as a digital repository for my music, so people can see what it's about and download it if they want to. YUDU wants to market the fact that their service can be used for musicians, so they've featured my library on their homepage.

To see my library and hear songs from "Middle Country," an album I created to raise money for a China mission trip, go to www.yudu.com and click the "featured library," the middle square in the green box at right.

If I can ever get some time, the sequel will be coming out.

Magical Dry Cleaning Every Guy Should Know About

2009-04-18T16:16:00.004-04:00

When I graduated from college, my business attire consisted of a hand-me-down navy blazer, a few pairs of khakis in various shades and brown leather shoes that didn't even match the color of my tattered belt. I had no versatility in my dressier wardrobe. I'd look the same on the day a family member died as I would if a friend was getting married or if I was going for a job interview.

Somehow, I guess because special occasions are also usually one-time occurrences, I was able to stretch the utility of this default get-up. Rarely would I see extended family frequently enough for them to recall that I wore the same outfit on the previous occasion. And job interviews and graduations were different arenas entirely. They were short, and the bit players and settings always changed.

Because I wasn't in a fraternity or business association and participated in few extracurricular activities (besides video games, intramural sports, leading Bible studies and playing my guitar), in the fashion category I had little need for more than a pair of flip-flops and a staggering array of t-shirts and jeans during my time at university.

But all that changed on the day I wore my trusty job interview/funeral/wedding/graduation outfit to meet with my first prospective full-time employer. With my safety-pinned gold buttons holding my polyester blazer in place and khakis furtively covering the white tube socks coming out of my coffee-colored suede shoes, I sat before the woman I'd replace and the man who'd become my boss. A few weeks later they hired me as an international business reporter.

The thing about being a business reporter is that you have to go to events and venues where international business is being conducted. Often, that includes lunches and dinners at swanky restaurants or hotels where safety-pinned clothes are frowned upon, to say the least. Another thing is that you often meet with sharp-looking businesspeople and diplomats who might not give the time of day to someone who looks like they've just shuffled in from off the street.

My problem was deeper still, compounded by the fact that as a reporter, you're expected to build a community, a network of sources and friends that help you feel the pulse of what's going on in your area of coverage. If I wore the same thing to event after event, certainly people would begin to notice.

To make a long story short, I'll tell you that I had to buy suits, more suits than I ever wanted to waste - I mean, spend - money on. I have a black suit, a brown suit, a gray suit, a navy suit, another gray suit and a seersucker suit. I got extremely good deals on all these, but it was still an expense I hadn't foreseen. Graduating college, I thought I was finally going to begin making real money. That part was true, but it turns out that life seems to demand a lot more from you if you're married with a relatively nice apartment and a car payment (at least more than when you were living with five other guys and drove a busted-up, but paid-off, Volvo station wagon).

Aside from the fact that I'd rather see life lived solely in t-shirts, what really annoys me about suits, or just dressing up in general, is that I can't use the washing machine to clean my nice clothes. So on top of all I spent to buy clothes made of high-quality fabrics, I keep pouring money into them just to keep them looking presentable. You'd think that the relationship between price and convenience would be correlative, not inverse, like with microwaves.

I've never liked dry cleaning. I went to the drive-thru cleaners quite often with my mom when I was young. She'd always pull the massive load through her window and employ my help in draping a huge bundle of wire hangers over those tiny hooks that hang down from the ceiling above the back seat. We'd get the clothes home and store them in closets until the next special occasion, when I'd pull them out to discover, to my horror, that the shirts had been starched. I'd soon be walking around like I was stuffed in a shirt-shaped cardboard box.

This childhood aversion hasn't gone away, and it's worse now because I'm the one that's footing the bill for the madness and having to waste time during my day to go to shady, drab dry cleaning establishments, where prices are obscured and aesthetics are totally sacrificed on the altar of cruel efficiency.

So imagine my delight and surprise when, as we were rushing to get ready for a funeral visitation, Katy revealed to me that there was a product that could totally eliminate this hassle. It's called Dryel. It comes with this magical bag, in which you place up to four of your suit jackets or pants, skirts or other non-machine-washable articles of clothing. Along with the clothing, you throw in the secret ingredient, an equally magical "ULTRA cleaning cloth." Toss the sack in the dryer and let it tumble around for a half hour, and voila, the clothes come out looking just as good as if you'd lugged a massive laundry basket a few miles and dropped it off with your favorite reclusive dry cleaner, who would hide the clothes for a period of two to four days, at which point you'd return to pay the ransom and set them free.

For totally eliminating this process and doing so at a fraction of the cost of normal dry cleaning, Dryel is my new best friend. It's one thing that all guys should know about but I assume very few do.

Luscious Lyon

2009-04-14T02:32:00.008-04:00

A rapid dessert tour of Lyon's old district

My trip to France's second-largest city was a business trip, so I didn't exactly have time to delve into all of its culinary offerings. And the trip really snuck up on me as far as scheduling goes, so I didn't have time to be a good reporter and do the research on where to find the most authentic morsels to chow down on.

Good thing our press handlers had both lived in Lyon for awhile.

Shortly after our first few meetings and interviews, we killed some time by stopping at an authentic French ice cream shop called Nardone Rene on Quai de Bondy on the west bank of the Saone River. I opted for two scoops (one each of blackberry and praline) in a cone, but there were numerous other tubs my taste buds were begging me to dive into. And besides ice cream, there were waffles smothered in powdered sugar, crepes and other sweet delights. If we had more time, I would've gained at least five pounds.

The next day, knowing that we had two hours in the morning to walk around, I deliberately skipped breakfast at the hotel. That way, I'd have all the more reason to stuff myself with offerings from local pastry shops. With so many pastries, tarts, artisan chocolates and baked goods to choose from, our guide helped me narrow it down to an eclaire (authentic French) and a tarte de praline (authentically Lyon).

Watch me try to force down my eclaire here:

Travel Snapshots: Silk Shop in Lyon, France

2009-04-14T02:17:00.009-04:00

When we only had a few hours to get souvenirs for our wives, our guide took my boss and me to an old-style silk shop west of the Saone in the older part of Lyon.

I couldn't fork over the 70 euros for the authentic, hand-loomed scarf I wanted, but I did get a cultural experience out of it. Check out the video here, and photos are below:

Marketing ploy or true story? This guy said silk has been in his family for generations.

Weights hanging below to balance the loom.

Who knows how much spin we were getting from him, but the shop owner says he makes scarves for famous brands like Hermes.

Looking out from workshop to the sales floor.

Spools are to the weaver what paint is to the painter.

Lyon: The Liveable France

2009-04-14T00:33:00.012-04:00

During my recent trip to France, one of the businessmen we interviewed had an interesting outlook on French-American relations.

He pointed to the long history of collaboration between our two countries, which extends back to the birth of both of the modern democracies during the late 1700s. Though the early part of this millennium saw a strain in the relationship due to disagreements on how to handle the War on Terror (think "freedom fries"), our leaders are now cordial and our people have a mutual respect for each other, he said.

"We admire your way of doing business, your productivity and innovation, and I think you admire our culture and way of life," he said.

I think there's some truth to this. Paris' cultural treasures took me aback. Literally, there was history around every corner, and I enjoyed the cafe culture and the way that people live their lives in the city's sidewalk transparency. But I grew up in a relatively small town in Georgia, and it was hard to imagine myself permanently embracing the way of life in a metro area inhabited by more than 10 million people.

Like any modern city, Paris has an inherent need to function, and function isn't always glamorous. Logistics is not for luxury. It's a business of utility, and that was sorely evident on the dingy subway trains that ferried me past thousands of graffiti-ridden walls throughout the capital city. Coming in from the airport on a line known as the RER, I could've been in any large city in the world, not the sterilized Paris of travel brochures and wine advertisements.

My boss and I took a fast train (the TGV) out of Paris to France's second-largest city on our third day in country. In Lyon, which has about 1.4 million people in its metro area, I found a more liveable France, and one that has aims to become even more liveable in the near future with beautification projects near the rivers and numerous developments throughout the city.

It's amazing how much you can learn about a place in a day. Thanks to fearless press attaches provided for us by Lyon's chamber of commerce, we witnessed one of France's famous protests, conducted five interviews, shopped for souvenirs, took a trip to an ice cream parlor, met the city's socialist mayor, attended an evening concert and ate some delicious meals into a period of a little more than 24 hours.

Throughout the journey, we rode in four or five different cars, weaving in and out of traffic and dodging road blocks the police had set up to accommodate demonstrators showing their distaste for a national measure to cut funding for early childhood education. Riding around with people who know a city is a great way to learn a place. Here's the two-minute description of the picture I got as Lyon whirred past the car window:

-Situated on two rivers, the Rhone and the Saone. The north-to-south-running rivers are the lifeblood of the city and are essential landmarks for orienting oneself while moving about the city. At the southern end, they come together at a point known (appropriately enough) as the confluence. The sliver land in between is called the Presqu’île.

-Lumiere brothers lived in Lyon and were among the world's first filmmakers.

-Numerous restaurants, city renowned for its gastronomic offerings. Bouchon is a local way of cooking that relies heavily on meats. Supposedly only 20 official bouchon restaurants, but many claim the label. Bouchon literally means "cork" in French.

-Silk industry found up on "the hill," a mountainside overlooking downtown. We visited a silk shop in the old city. Along the banks of the Saone lie buildings from Renaissance-period Lyon, which look lighter and more Dutch than the heavier French architecture throughout the rest of the city.

-St. John cathedral built originally in 12th century and has an iconic rose window and a functioning astronomical clock that was built in the 13oos.

-License plates with No. 69 are Lyon plates. Paris is 75.

Of course there was more, but like I said, we spent only one night there. I think much of my positive experience in Lyon was due to the people. One of our handlers was a 31-year-old French girl with an Italian dad and a Russian husband. Her two-year-old son loves Lionel Richie. Our other guide was a 21-year-old intern who loves to cook and has researched Atlanta for a project she completed on the impact of art exhibitions on communities. She specializes in urban planning.

It was sad to leave them at the train station, but now I know that Lyon should definitely be on my list if I get to return to France. When we arrived back in Paris, we had dinner, then lights out. There were planes to catch in the morning. Denmark and Sweden awaited me.

Watch me suffering in Lyon for my job:

And here's a quick shot of St. John's cathedral:

Rough France Videos

2009-04-12T03:44:00.003-04:00

I hope to polish a few of these and edit them more completely, but here are some rough France videos taken with my digital camera and uploaded to my new YouTube channel. Check out here some scenes from Paris and Lyon. Posts from Copenhagen, Denmark as well as cities in Sweden forthcoming.

Eiffel Tower: A Tall Order

2009-04-12T01:33:00.007-04:00

After our Louvre adventure and visits to Notre Dame cathedral and Luxembourg gardens, we settled down at a corner cafe, where my dinner consisted of a roast duck garnished with Brussels sprouts and bathed in a delicious sauce. According to my boss, who lived in France during two different eras of his life, sauces are where French chefs shine. I could now taste why.

The day was nearing its end, and after just over 12 hours in country, I'd checked many of Paris' main historical sites off my list. We had arrived at 6 a.m. and walking became our chosen method of staying awake and shrugging off jet lag.

I learned a few things during those thousands of steps. Paris is a beautifully gray capital city. The architecture is heavy and a bit cold, and the monuments are plentiful. It was only April and the place was already crawling with tour groups - students from Barcelona, Asians with money to spend, a few intrepid backpackers. Long barges carried guests up and down the Seine. Buds were just appearing on the trees. Girls in painted-on jeans and high boots hit the shops, smoldering cigarettes firmly in hand. Spring was right around the corner. My boss, the France veteran, said we arrived just a bit too early to see the city in its full bloom.

But the cultural scene wasn't dormant. Music was everywhere. On a late night metro train, a guy across from me restrung his classical guitar and serenaded me half the ride home, his fingers nonchalantly flying up and down the fretboard at impossible speeds. When I transferred trains, a troupe of accordions took me the rest of the way. At the Eiffel Tower, breakdancers held an impromptu meet, and a guitarist and drummer earned their keep by crooning for the crowd. The French capital, I learned, melds old-world charm with modern flavor, two ingredients that often mix in just the right proportions in popular cities worldwide.

The Eiffel Tower, I found is somewhere between the old and new. I admittedly knew little about the structure before I learned that I'd be going to France, but the 300-meter tower's story is interesting. In a city with very few highrises, the iron structure is audacious in size and substance. We could see its tip from our hotel, but it was a long walk, and we visited it up close on our second day in country, after a full day of meetings and interviews.

If there's one thing the French have a flair for, it's spectacle, my boss said. When he lived in Paris in the late 1980s, a festival was held where they planted wheat along the Champs Elysees. Years before that, France had set up a table that spanned the entire country, and everyone had shared a meal, he said.

But it seems, from my brief experience, that achievement in France comes without a fair share of grumbling by certain factions.

The Eiffel Tower, it seems, was no different. Like the Beijing Olympics of 2008, it faced a tall order in satisfying the home team while showing off Paris' charms to the world. It was built in the late 1889 for the Universal Exposition in Paris after Barcelona rejected Gustave Eiffel's plans to construct it there on the grounds that it didn't fit the city's style. French artists also protested the construction, thinking it would be an eyesore that would detract from the city's aesthetics. Originally, it was built to last only 20 years, and instead of inciting romance and stirring French nationalism, its initial purpose was to be an airborne science lab where Eiffel could observe wind movements and take physics measurements.

Now, utility has given way to culture, and what began as a controversial project is the unanimous symbol of France throughout the world.

Paris seems to have a propensity toward controversial landmarks. The Montparnasse Tower, a bland highrise that can be seen from all over town. is still considered a bad move, as was the glass pyramid structure that now all but defines the Louvre. They're all still standing, undaunted by the initial protests and vindicated by time and popularity.

I first saw the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero district looking southeast. I rounded a corner and was rewarded with the low murmur of happy voices and a breathtaking full view. From there, we descended the hill and walked through the tower's underbelly and out on the Champ des Mars, where we branched out to find our next dinner.

The next day, we'd leave the capital and travel to Lyon.

Mona Lisa: My Louvre Private Tour

2009-04-11T10:23:00.010-04:00

She stared at me with those dark brown eyes, and I couldn't resist. I had to look back. There were only four people in the room. Three of us were men, and we were all staring. Her hands were folded daintily, right over left, as she sat, still and picturesque, holding us captive with her gaze. Perfectly proportioned, she had her hair parted in front, and she let it flow down to her shoulders. Her lips looked soft to the touch. She was the pure portrait of beauty, and her expression held a hint of mystery.

All that separated us was a tinted gray piece of glass, and though she held my eyes for a long time, I couldn't reach out and touch her. I wouldn't want to smudge one of the greatest works of art in the world.

I'm not being figurative. I was staring at the Mona Lisa, the masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci, which is on permanent display at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

I must admit, I'm no art connoisseur, but there is something about that painting that tantalizes in the same way that a beautiful, snow-capped mountain range draws you up toward the summit. Maybe it's the fact that it's one of the most recognizable works of art known to man. Maybe it really is the transcendence of Leonardo's artistry. Either way, I was feeling extremely fortunate to be standing before it, especially when on a Tuesday when the museum was closed.

The Louvre is arguably the greatest museum in the world. I had heard this, but having never been to Europe, I really had no reference against which to test such a huge claim. After visiting Paris, I still don't have an empirical measuring stick, but seeing the sprawl of the museum campus and strolling its halls, I can't see how it can have any rivals.

My private Louvre tour started when my boss and I, jet-lagged and without a cell phone, showed up at the Louvre armed only with a vague e-mail referral to a press contact, a few pitiful digital cameras, and clothes that we had been wearing for more than 24 hours straight. We'd been through a lot. Our flight was almost nine hours, and we'd taken a dirty, graffiti-ridden ride into the city on the metro. Commuters glared at me the whole way when they noticed my 45-lb. suitcase taking up a valuable seat.

Due to some poor planning, the hotel we spent nearly two hours finding was not the same where we had a reservation. After that saga, we took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe and took the long walk from there down the Avenue des Champs Elysees to the Louvre, my feet aching all the way.

After a true Parisian cafe lunch, my head was pounding and my body protesting as I tried to push through the jet lag. We crept into the administrative offices of the Louvre and sat down in a small room that once housed the man who tended the horses when the majestic building served as a castle.

A press aide came and led us down into the catacombs, passing us off to another girl, who led us across the complex to the dark office of the head of the sculpture department. After a 15-minute interview, one of our handlers whisked us off to show us a new exhibition of Egyptian art, which focuses on how the pharaohs prepared for the afterlife. I thought this would be the extent of our tour, but as we were walking out, our handler (the fourth since we arrived) said, "Would you like to see anything else?"

Seriously? A better question would've been, "What don't you want to see?" We had only been in a few rooms. Thousands of sculptures, paintings, reliefs, pieces of pottery and other artworks awaited our ooo's and aaah's. Where to begin?

The handler must've noticed the dumbfounded look on my face as I considered the boundless options. He offered a superb suggestion: "How about Italian art?" Like I said, I'm no connoisseur, but that sounded good to me. Suddenly I wasn't so tired anymore.

We followed the signs to the Mona Lisa, where I noticed that her majesty is not in her size. It's actually a relatively small painting, especially juxtaposed with some of the other artworks in the room where it is displayed. Opposite her small portrait, a larger-than-life painting occupies a massive wall. Beyond that lies a cavernous hallway where an endless procession of legendary works awaits. I counted more than five Leonardos during our brief walkthrough, and there were countless others, marked by Italian names that better-educated folks surely would've recognized.

On the way down, we walked quickly past the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a famous 2,300-year-old sculpture from Ancient Greece, and we stopped in on another Greek all-star, the Venus de Milo. I felt a bit sacrilegious in that I didn't know much about any of the beautiful works that surrounded me and couldn't exactly tell you why they were considered masterpieces.

We passed through more hallways before emerging back out in the entry area beneath the museum's iconic glass pyramid. With a bit more spring in our step, my boss and I said our goodbyes with the handlers and continued our tour of Paris, shaking our heads at the access that journalism can give.

Watch an exhausted Trevor talk about the experience in the video below:

Being Agreeable in French

2009-04-04T18:30:00.005-04:00

I speak no French. It's a definite flaw when traveling in France, I know. I hate being that guy who knows absolutely zilch of the language, the one that asks for an English menu and responds with blank stares to the waiter's questions.

But I've been traveling with French speakers and I've learned a few things. I might not be able to say them, but I can hear them in conversation. The French language is quite elegant and soft, even in the most common speech. Here are a few ways to be agreeable in French:

-Voila - French people actually say this word - and really often. That surprised me. I always thought it was just something we hijacked. It usually denotes completion, just like we tend to use it in English, something like "There it is" or "It's done." It can also mean, "Here he comes," "The car has arrived," "He answered the phone," or a million different other things.

-D'accord - Interchangeable with OK, but it sounds a lot more fancy to me.

-C'est bon -It's good; we're ready; it's satisfactory.

Photo taken just a few days ago. Copyright Trevor Williams 2009.

Paris - Not Enough Words

2009-04-04T16:59:00.007-04:00

Paris is a conundrum. It's trouble for the writer. So big, consuming, sprawling and impressive yet simple and refined, it's really hard to nail down with just one description. Countless books have tried, praising it's charms as a romantic travel destination as well as its educational value in being an open book of a cityscape.

Being there for three days, I saw a lot of the city, but it just feels sacrilegious to try to cover it in a blog entry. That's like summing up New York City with a post card of the Empire State Building. Any two-dimensional picture my words conjure up will be like a fleeting image on a digital camera.

So I'm not going to try to be your eyes and ears here, but I will give you a taste of some of the things I noticed about the cultural, fashion and commercial capital. Remember, I'm speaking here from the perspective of an awed tourist, not the avid traveler who's going to show the ropes of how to get around.

You can't always trust the movies, but they hit Paris' cafe culture on the dot. I saw one drive-thru on the outskirts of town - it was a McDonald's, mind you - but for the most part, there seems to be a sit-down cafe with a nice ambience on every corner. Unlike my part of America, where free-standing chain restaurants dominate many areas, you can walk most any street in Paris an expensive but delicious place to relax and eat. My boss and I dropped into about four different cafes. I can't complain about any of them.

At the same time though, France is not all glitz and glamour. Paris has astounding historical beauty, but that beauty still rests in the middle of a thriving modern city. That means graffiti, dirty metro systems, poor air quality at times and a general lack of the polish that suburban Americans might not expect.

But any dissatisfaction fades away the monuments reveal themselves. I never took a day of European history class, but I was stunned by the height of the Eiffel Tower, the breadth of the Louvre, the stout mass of the Arc du Triomphe and the mystical beauty of Notre Dame. I'm sure it's even more fascinating when you're not lacking in culture like me. I don't think I've ever given France due respect for its contributions to the world.

Cars are an interesting phenomenon in Paris. They're extremely tiny and apparently must be one of about five or six brands: Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Smart Car or Mercedes. With their cars, the Parisians who actually drive seem to value the utility of their vehicle in a cramped city over ostentatious displays of wealth that characterize many of the big cars in America.

I could go on, but there's more to come, so I'll leave now with some bullet points on travel logistics:

-Trains - RER from airport to city is long, especially when you arrive at 6 a.m. and disgruntled commuters are mad that you put your 40-lb. suitcase in one of the seats.

-Metro - Don't expect luxury from the Metro. It has one purpose, to move people, and it does that quite well, unless you're unluckly like me and happen to come at a time when they're renovating one stop you need and closed the other.

-Hotels - Maybe it's because we got set up by a government agency, but Parisian hotels are extremely expensive.

-Internet - Get acquainted with the city's wireless networks to avoid paying 5 euros per hour in the hotels. I wasn't educated on that, and I suffered. Not very many of the cafes seemed to be wireless ready, and plus I had little time to surf.

-People - France is a country of a little more than 60 million people. It gets 84 million tourists a year. The French people were extremely nice and helpful to us. I don't know how they have the patience after seeing people from all over the world trampling on their turf.

-American Abduction? I saw extremely few Americans. Global financial crisis, anyone?

-Weather - During winter, Paris is gray and dark. Spring is coming soon, as evidenced by the nice weather we witnessed.

-Take a spouse or significant other - It's lonely in a foreign city with no one to talk to.

All photos Copyright Trevor Williams 2009.

From top: First visit to the tower; Notre Dame from the inside; Seine River at evening

T Minus 3

2009-03-30T12:26:00.003-04:00

Three hours till the plane leaves. For only getting four hours of sleep last night, I'm surprisingly awake. Maybe it's the coffee. Or the adrenaline.

Just got a call from my boss. He's coming to pick me up from the office, and we're heading to the airport to dance through security and work at the gate.

Goodbye with Katy was tough. I tried to focus her energies on thinking of the souvenirs she wants from France, Denmark and Sweden. It wasn't enough to keep tears from flowing. I stayed strong, but I wasn't going to last much longer.

Got some feedback from some of the folks I'm trying to set up interviews with in Denmark and Sweden. Trip looks like it will be a success.

In T minus three, I'll be headed across the Atlantic for my first European journey.

12 Hours Till Takeoff - France, Denmark, Sweden

2009-03-30T03:24:00.007-04:00

It's 3 a.m. I'm still packing for a week-long business jaunt to France, Denmark and Sweden.

My flight leaves tomorrow afternoon (or, technically, later today), and as the night slips away, I'm starting to feel stuck in that purgatory between the discomfort of leaving all that is familiar and the excitement that awaits me in strange and mysterious lands on the other side of the ocean.

The bags are pretty much packed, but in some ways, I never feel prepared for an international trip, especially to a place I've never been before. There's always something else I can learn, some linguistic tidbit I might need, some food recommendation that could make the difference between a delicious meal and five hours in the can, some lodging tip that could separate rat-infested inns from trendy hostels.

I've traveled to China five times, but I've never been to Europe before. After my first trip to China, I started learning the language, guessing correctly that I'd be back many times. I don't speak a word of French, and I will land in Paris with admittedly little knowledge about the artistic and cultural treasures the city holds. [Insert jealousy-induced boos and hisses here.] I probably know even less about Denmark and Sweden, although I don't feel quite so guilty about that.

There's something great about being the expert in a place, the one that everybody turns to when they need to know which cultural snafus to avoid. I've been that guy in China, and it gives you a surprising sense of superiority and accomplishment.

But there's a bad side to this as well. If you think too highly about your own knowledge, you'll have little openness to all the new things happening right in front of you. Senses dulled, you'll be so engulfed in your opinion or leading the group that you lose that invaluable attribute that the traveler must have in order to achieve a transcendent experience: wonder.

In three countries over the next week, I'll be writing about international topics like biotechnology, climate change and entrepreneurship and how those reflect. But below the surface of meetings and interviews, my inexperience in these lands will ensure that the undercurrent of awe persists.

God's world is big. He says that he put people in the places where they live so that they could reach out to him and possibly find him. I can't think of anything I enjoy more than to observe how this great cosmic game of hide and seek plays itself out around the world.

Music to Your Ears (I Hope)

2009-03-27T16:27:00.004-04:00

I just added the contents of my YUDU library to the sidebar of the blog. YUDU is a site that allows you to publish and sell digital content including magazines, books, newsletters, podcasts, music and more. I'm just using it for music right now, but I might use it for digital publications in the future.

Click the icons on the sidebar to listen to some of my songs and download them from the YUDU site.

Waking Up to the Gospel

2009-03-20T10:38:00.003-04:00

A post from one of my mission trips is featured on the International Mission Board's East Asia field blog today. It's amazing how that journey changed my life and allowed me to wake up to the reality of the Gospel in a way that hadn't been real before.

As I said in one of my most recent posts, it's humbling to know that there are still places in this world where we are only representatives of the kingdom of God, living stones forming the pavement on the road that leads to him.

That backpacking trip across three countries keeps on giving - in friendships, in writing content and in the assurance that short-term trips are necessary and life-altering when done in the right context.

Click here to see my chronological journal of posts.

A Three-Book Course on Evading the Status Quo

2009-03-14T18:48:00.011-04:00

I've always been a bit of a cheapskate. It's not that I don't like luxury. I enjoy sheets that are soft enough to polish your sunglasses with and food that looks too pretty to eat just as much as the next guy (ask my wife).

I don't hate luxury. It's just the luxury, by definition, is not practical. It rushes beyond utility and tops it with the whipped cream and cherry of outlandish comfort. When I experience lavishness, I appreciate it, but I rarely expend my resources to achieve it.*

There are just too many useful things to spend money on. In essence, I try to prod myself with the same argument your mom used when you were little. You know, the thing about the starving kids in Ethiopia who would've loved a bite of that spaghetti you didn't finish or those Brussels sprouts you couldn't stomach.

So I walk the line between staying frugal and becoming miserly. In America, frugality is an anomaly, looked upon as old-fashioned and quaint as the world whizzes by - on your computer monitor and TV screen, in your magazine - with the latest in fashion and gadgetry. I love gadgets, so it's easy to get caught up in consumerism's storm.

But as I've gotten older and seen how much responsibility costs, I've learned that the people with the toys aren't always the ones with the real wealth. In fact, they're usually compensating for some emotional shortfall. I see this in myself sometimes. We want approval, love, affection, value, and we buy the lies that lead us to buy the things we're told will fulfill these needs.

To many people, money is an adversary, something they fight with daily, work for constantly, desire incessantly and in some cases, idolize. Not that I've achieved freedom from worry about it, but I've resolved that I'll do everything I can to make money a tool, something I master so that it works for me, not the other way around.

I'm a long way from doing this, so please don't hear arrogance in what I'm saying. I'm only 24 years old, so maybe I'm a bit naive, still blinded to bitter reality by the lingering euphoria of a steady paycheck even two years out of college.

My goal, though, is that money will not be a hindrance to my desire to live out my faith and life in a way that goes beyond the status quo, the humdrum monotony we all find ourselves resigning to if we let daily life erode our resistence to it.

Three books I've read in the last few months create a sort of rough guide to doing this. Interestingly enough, though they're books that have to do almost entirely with what Christians would call "secular" concerns, they've impacted the way I look at faith in the context of American life and have stoked the embers of adventure in my heart:

1. Embrace the millionaire paradox - According to The Millionaire Next Door, you don't need to have a trust fund to break into the exclusive top class of wealthy Americans. You need to be innovative, dedicated, hard-working, and have an instinct that is paradoxical in our society: You must be willing to relinquish present luxury for future security. In the words of money guru Dave Ramsey, that means living like no one else so you can live like no one else. If you cut back now, you'll be riding high later, while everyone around you is digging out of the pit they created.

2. Boost your productivity and utilize the mobility and potential for wealth creation that the 21st-century world provides - One of my favorite things about The 4-Hour Workweek is that author Tim Ferriss doesn't set out to make you a member of what he calls the "new rich" solely so you can lounge beside the ocean somewhere and drink mai tais. His ideal is activity - enjoyable and useful activity. He seeks to remove the time constraints and monetary hindrances that keep us from living the lives we want. His solution? Using carefully laid out techniques, you can boost productivity, automate income, escape 9-5 labor, and spend time on what makes you happy and the world a better place.

3. Protect what you've achieved from impending calamity - Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life is hot off the presses. It's purveyed as author Neil Strauss' all-around guide to getting a second citizenship and creating a sort of offshore backup life to protect yourself from the calamity that befall you or your assets in the world of Y2k, ethnic conflict, terrorism, nuclear launch buttons, failing banks and shrinking civil liberties. I'm halfway through it (220 pages in one day), and I now realize that it's more of a personal narrative of how Strauss did this, which is better than a guide, in my opinion. In addition to being well written and very entertaining, the book brings up a lot of issues about America and how we're perceived around the world. Even those of us who aren't paranoid yet can learn a lot about preparation from reading it.

And there you have it, a three-book course on evading the status quo, mostly with regard to money, the tool that makes the world go 'round.

*By this I mean, beyond the luxuries and conveniences that are incumbent in American life. By no means am I taking these for granted.

You Are the Kingdom

2009-03-10T23:08:00.007-04:00

A pastor friend of mine just re-posted an entry on his blog about a trip we took four years ago to three Asian countries. We were backpacking through villages, leaving traces of the Gospel and praying for those people we encountered - and many others we will never see.

His post recounts the last leg of our journey, when a six-hour trip turned into 13 after an out-of-season rainstorm flooded the country, turning dusty mountain roads into red-clay mush.

We caught one of the last buses out of town after having lost contact with our American team leaders. When we came to a place where the deluge had overtaken the road, we crossed a torrent of water on a makeshift bamboo bridge, and everyone on our bus crammed into another one on the other side of the river that was almost full already.

On another occasion, we waited an hour for workers to use a tiny chainsaw to cut a massive tree out of our path. Further down the road, we twice had to get out as the driver made impossible turns on mountain ledges, spinning the wheels of the dilapidated school bus that carried us to this country's border. At one point, the water was three- to five-feet deep, and we all applauded as our intrepid driver plowed through, getting us one step closer to home. We had a plane to catch to the U.S., and there was no telling if we'd make it.

I spent about half the journey standing up, holding a bar for support, or sitting on my pack or a bag of produce in the middle aisle. The rest of the time, I shared about one cubic foot with a native woman and her baby. With all the canvas bags of garlic-y crops scattered about and a bus filled to twice its capacity with hot, disgruntled patrons, it's amazing that I ever got to sit, even more amazing that the kids behind me were the only ones losing their lunch.

My friend mentions that at the end of this hellish ride we spent Easter Sunday at the border between two countries, one open to the Gospel, one militantly opposed to it. Did I mention that we had spent three hours the day before detained at the border of another country?

We were talking the other day about how life-changing it was to celebrate the risen Christ in a land where worshiping him is not permitted, where believers don't have the same privilege that we enjoyed in as we sat partaking Easter Communion in that river town. We broke bread from a local shop and sipped mango juice as wine.

"People just can't understand what that was like when you explain it to them," I told him the other day about the impact of the trip.

"You know," he replied, "People in this country just don't get that there are times when you are the Kingdom of God. You're it."

For that reason, the bus ride was worth it, even with all the obstacles along the way. In a way, it was like God leading us in a dramatic crescendo to the resounding final note on our journey. The roadblocks, he seemed to be showing us, were the reason we were there.

Before our trip even began, before we knew all the transportation trouble we'd face, our team had a name. It was the Roadmakers.

See my original blog posts from that trip here.

China's Year of Anniversaries

2009-03-09T23:22:00.006-04:00

It's the year of the ox, and you'd figure China would be fat and happy coming off 2008, when it enjoyed significant economic growth propelled in part by a largely successful Olympic Games that released its splendor for the masses to see.

Even with all the tumult in the run-up to the Games, things stayed relatively stable.

But this year could be different as the country comes down from its euphoric Olympic high, for a variety of reasons. Recently released numbers show that gross domestic product growth slipped below double digits for the first time in five years, and as the worldwide financial crisis persists, China's learning hard lessons about being largely dependent on foreign buyers and investors.

Exports are flagging, and factories are shedding jobs. Itinerant workers are having to leave the cities and head back to their home villages. The economic engine is stalling, and China's predicting just (man, would we kill for this kind of "just") 8 percent growth for 2009.

Along with all these factors, this is a year of anniversaries, more than any other year at least in the past decade. Some will likely provoke celebration. Some will spur outbreaks of unrest. In all, let it not be said that China watchers will be bored this year.

The cycle begins today, as Beijing tries to downplay and supporters try to play up the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule that resulted in the Dalai Lama's exile. The capital is on high alert, even though this officially is just a normal Tuesday (as this IHT article so eloquently describes it).

Dates are extremely symbolic in China. As the article above points out, a strong historical focus on numerology means that the Chinese refer to events by their date rather than their location, much like we think of 9/11.

The Tiananmen Square massacre is known as 6/4. A famous 1919 student movement that sparked nationalist sentiment is known as the May Fourth Movement. Even last year, authorities held the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies on 08/08/08, beginning at 8:08 p.m., just because the number eight sounds like a word for prosperity.

We know that Chinese officials will be milking the anniversaries they support to gain whatever public favor they can. It'll be interesting to see how the Communist Party this year will walk the tightrope that perennially characterizes its modern struggle: weighing its iron clamp on power against the stated goal and unspoken hope from its citizens more freedom and rights.

That said, the Chinese people seem to be enjoying the stability and relative prosperity that the Party has provided, so it'll also be interesting to see how many people push the limits as the economy sags.

Here's what to be watching for, as China is "dressed to the nines" with anniversaries:

-90th - May 4 will the the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement.
-60th - The People's Republic of China was founded on Oct. 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong took the stage victoriously in Tiananmen Square to declare that the civil war between his forces and the Guomin Dang armies was all but over.
-50th - Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. The Dalai Lama has been exiled since this failed attempt to regain authority in the southwestern province. The Chinese government still views him with wariness and regularly takes him on in the media.
-30th - Reform and opening - In 1979, China opened its economy and normalized diplomatic relations with the U.S. The one-child policy was instituted this same year.
-20th - On June 4, 1989, Deng Xiaoping ordered China's army to attack pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Hundreds were killed, and the day lives on as one of the most infamous in modern Chinese history.

Georgia's Fickle Weather

2009-03-08T22:25:00.002-04:00

Around the apartment in Decatur, I show how Georgia's fickle weather went from blustery blizzard to sunny Sunday in just one week.

The Right Place

2009-03-08T16:37:00.002-04:00

Don't worry. You haven't gone to the wrong place. This is still the blog of Trevor Williams, although it looks a bit different than the black background frequent readers were used to.

For those of you who haven't been here for awhile, don't be afraid to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or check out my YouTube videos by clicking the tiles in the sidebar. Also, you can listen to some of my songs and download them from the graphic on the right as well.

I hope to make some improvements to this blog design, most notably a new header, but in the meantime I think this spices things up a bit. This new layout also has a better archiving system and more gadgets to choose from as well. It's a step up that didn't require a full-on switch from Google's Blogger to Wordpress.

Emergency! Keeping Sickness from Owning You

2009-03-06T21:39:00.009-05:00

My head felt like a watermelon teetering at the top of my weak neck. My heart pumped up against my ribcage. The organs behind it felt like they wanted to break out of their bony prison. Cold and shaking, arms aching, I knew it was time. Emergency room, here I come.

They say you're not supposed to drive yourself, but I had no other option. My wife was working, and even though she knew how scared I was, she couldn't just up and leave. The thought of her not being there if this was something serious riddled me with anxiety and worsened my condition. Somehow I dizzily walked to the car and drove the mile to the hospital, pondering my fate. Was this morning the last time I'd share coffee with my wife?

I know. I sound like a drama queen, but this was strange new feeling for me. I normally hate even taking pain medicine, and I usually go to the doctor about once a year. But ever since the night before I couldn't shake the urge go to the ER. No matter how much I fought it, I was certain my body was rebelling against me. Was I just paranoid, or would I be sorry that I didn't seek care sooner?

I arrived with a sense of urgency. Apparently, I was the only one who felt that way. This was not TV; nobody was rushing like they do on Grey's Anatomy or ER. The automatic doors didn't open when I tried to come in. I stood there, waving and pleading for someone to open the door. The ladies at the front desk stared at me like I was a coach customer trying to weasel my way into first class. I finally got in only when someone else left.

The lady acknowledged me grudgingly. She took my insurance card and driver's license and instructed me to sit down. They'd process me after the paperwork printed out.

I sat down, and then it hit me. After the paperwork? Seriously? So you're telling me if I'm dying, it's more important to have a printed record that I checked in before I croaked? Apparently so.

Five minutes later, a neat stack of papers had rolled off the presses. I was still alive. To make a long and boring story shorter, after EKGs, X-rays, blood tests, and two bags of saline solution pumped through my veins over five hours, doctors were confident that my heart was normal along with everything else and that I was not, in fact, going to die - yet.

They discharged me, but this is just the beginning of the story. Over the next week, I went to my primary care doctor twice and mixed in another visit to the ER when severe lightheadedness rudely added itself to the growing list of uninvited symptoms crashing my body's party. Two weeks after that second ER visit, I'm back at work but still recovering.

Throughout the ordeal, I've learned some things about being sick, lessons that my good health kept me from learning over my first 23 years. If it were up to me, I'd do without these hard-earned nuggets of wisdom, but as he's reminded me in the past few weeks, God always has reasons for what he allows us to go through.

My main takeaway is that my faith - however fortified I thought it to be - was weak when tested with uncertainty. And what good is faith if it's not functional when doubt arrives? That's an oxymoron, like a health insurance policy that's only effective when you're well.

With weak faith and a body pummeled by the mysterious, unnamed illness, I allowed the sickness to own me. I worried constantly and dreamed up all kinds of explanations for my symptoms, the more severe the better. This was an open case, and I wanted to solve it rather than trust God to handle it.

An earnest prayer helped me find my way out of that trap, and since then, I've compiled a few ways to keep sickness from becoming an idol:

1. Stay around other people - Sickness, at least for me, has the tendency to cause self-absorption. It's understandably hard to think about others when you've got symptoms like mine or even more severe ailments, like so many unfortunate patients I saw on my ER visit.

But self-absorption can easily morph into worry, which usually has negative physiological effects. I found that I was most positive when I was focusing on someone else. Faith helps, but a head knowledge that God's got things under control doesn't take away fear. And fear is fertile ground for worry to take root.

2. Get married - Wives save lives, and I still owe mine a nice dinner. Maybe after all the medical bills are paid. Seriously, though, she was rock-solid when I was worrying like a pansy. She refused to believe anything bad might happen. Her insistence was a bit annoying when I felt like I was going to die, but if she had melted down, I might have.

3. Learn - This will be tough and next to impossible for those with life-threatening or terminal illnesses. I understand, and I'm trying not to be insensitive. But for me, once I found out that I was generally OK, the experience became a great opportunity to learn about the glories of empathy and the woes of the American health care system. This kept me distracted, which kept me from worry, just like #1.

4. Make peace with death so you can truly live - Those first few moments in the emergency room, I tried to make peace with death. This might be difficult for those who don't have faith in God or an afterlife. Those aren't hurdles for me. My life has been a good one, and although I'm still afraid of dying, knowing that I'm satisfied with the life I've lived is a strong source of peace.

It's freeing to be content with death, because death is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to you. Beyond that, what is there to fear? The best lives are lived not with a morbid focus on death, but with a realization of our transience and the urgency with which we must steward our time on earth.

Please pray that I'll continue to recover, but more than that, that the clarity that sickness has brought won't fade when the symptoms go away.

Freshly Fallen

2009-03-03T23:34:00.005-05:00

No matter how beautiful it is undisturbed, I'm always tempted to walk through a patch of snow freshly fallen, where no one has been since it first blanketed the ground.

We had a big snow the other day (never thought I'd be able to say that in Georgia), and I couldn't resist the urge. I put on the boots I bought for a trip to Maine a few years ago and tromped around the grounds of my apartment complex, looking for especially pristine plots to defile.

I guess you could say this tendency metaphorically represents my spiritual life in two conflicting ways, one good, one bad.

We'll take the bad news first. For one, I think it reflects my unrelenting desire in each situation to exert my own will, not to let things rest just in their unspoiled state.

But on the other hand, on a truer level, I think this shows something more pure about who I am. I want to make the first tracks in that fluffy patch of pure powdery white because I want to be a trailblazer, to go where no one else has gone, to become the first to walk a certain path.

This is good and bad in my walk with Jesus, especially with regard to evangelism. In some ways I feel like Paul, who in his letter to the Romans said, "It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation." After tasting that morsel of satisfaction that comes with planting a seed of the Gospel in new soil, Paul saw it as his mission to continue sowing.

I feel Paul on that one, as evidenced by the way I do well sharing my faith overseas to new ears but often can't find the same resolve in my daily life. I just find the fact that billions still haven't heard Jesus' name appalling, especially with the riches in technology and knowledge that we possess in this country.

In comparison with the soft soil I have sometimes found abroad, Americans seem like icy snow - frozen over, slippery and hard to penetrate. They seem jaded, and the natural inclination - at least for me - is to prematurely move on.

But here's something I've learned, and it has helped me keep a soft heart towards Americans who have rejected Jesus time and again: Many of them are not rejecting Jesus or his grace. They are rejecting the image of him that has been presented to them. They often understand that we believe he died on the cross and rose from the grave. But they don't get his audacious acceptance, and no one has ever taken the time to break it down for them. Most of all, they just don't know who he is.

May I be one who breaks the ice and makes the introduction.

Problems with Militant Atheism

2009-02-25T21:01:00.012-05:00

While I've been sick this past week, I've watched a lot of movies. One of them was Ben Stein's "Expelled," a documentary that looks at the scientific establishment's militant push to silence those in their field who believe the universe could have been designed by an intelligent force.

Between films, I read C.S. Lewis' book on miracles, aptly called "Miracles," a sprawling philosophical work that defends the Christian belief in God's ability and desire to interfere in nature's course. His ultimate goal is to prove the possibility of what he calls "The Grand Miracle," the Resurrection.

Though created some 50 years apart by authors with different objectives, both works get at the heart of the fallacy espoused by those who think the notion of a supreme being is utterly unreasonable.

Whether a naturalist (Lewis' foe) or an ardent evolutionist (Stein's target), the objections raised by religion's opponents always presuppose something about the universe and what's possible within its bounds.

I probably only understood about half of what Lewis was saying, but I did get this part, which he said infinitely more eloquently than I'll put it here: Miracles don't break the laws of nature. They validate them. The very fact that nature is expected to take a certain course is what makes unexplainable events exceptional. Miracles are exceptional by nature. They operate outside the observed patterns.

Lewis' point is that naturalists presuppose that Nature - that which we see and perceive with our senses - is all there is, or "the whole show," as he calls it in his oh-so-British prose. But this outlook is needlessly closed-minded, because we observe supernatural events each time an idea pops into our heads. Our thoughts, because they are controlled by a conscious force beyond mere molecular reactions in the brain, are miraculous. They are not part of "the whole show," Lewis argues.

Unlike Lewis, Ben Stein didn't have to make his own convincing argument. He just asked evolutionists simple questions, and the most brilliant minds in their camp started spinning in intellectual circles.

Darwin's theory of evolution speaks of how species changed into other species over millions of years of genetic mutation. When a mutation helped the organism survive, it lived longer and was able to propagate that advantageous trait to more offspring. Over time, these mutations multiplied and complex organisms are thought to have evolved from single cells.

Stein's movie proved that you don't even have to begin to dismantle the theory's problems to get under evolutionists' skin. You just have to talk about the uncertainty that evolution - even if true - leaves about the nature of the universe and its beginnings.

Stein posed the question: How did life originate? It was almost unbelievable to watch these "intellectual giants" squirm to find the answer. Even more remarkable were the lengths they reached to in order to keep from admitting even the possibility of an intelligent designer.

One guy who called religious people stupid earlier in the dialogue thought that life originated when natural forces blended together to create crystals. That was his explanation: Crystals, which are inorganic, created organic matter. And just when I thought they couldn't get more audacious, in stepped one of today's most celebrated - and militant - atheist thinkers, Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion."

Stein gave him the chance to bestow his omniscience on the masses by telling us where life came from.

His answer? It's possible that higher life forms could have seeded life on earth. In other words, aliens could've put us here. And get this: the aliens could've been created by an intelligent force.

Seriously? This is a man who demands empirical proof from religion and calls believers in God ignorant? Why does he have to create three degrees of separation to admit the possibility that intelligence could have created the universe?

His presupposition is that God, by any name, is not possible. Better aliens than a personal being who demands something of him.

The Genuine Article

2009-02-19T20:29:00.002-05:00

The world is yearning for real Christianity. Paradoxical statement? Maybe, but two conversations I had last week make me think that there's something to this.

I have a friend who's an unbeliever. I've been discussing Christianity with him since high school. His beef with my religion was never about its morality, its tenets, or how I lived it out. He believed in strict science, evolution over creation.

I talked with him again the other day, this time about Christian music. This friend is one of the most talented musicians I know. He can play anything he tries - drums, guitar, piano - anything. But what sets him apart even more than his talent is his passion. The drive to hear, play, and especially create music consumes him.

So imagine his disgust when he hears some of the saccharine Christian music of the radio: affirmation of faith after affirmation of faith. Encouragement after encouragement. There's not enough art in it, not enough struggle. Every lyric is just dripping with assurance. It's all so literal. He wonders how they're all so convinced.

Truth is, we're not, and my friend just wants to hear us admit it.

I talked the other day with another friend who is a believer. He recently went to a church he just didn't really enjoy. There was a lot of worship, a lot of music, but he felt that it was more a pep rally than a place where a fledgling faith could truly grow. To some, I'm sure it was an encounter with the Spirit of God. To him, it was a gathering of disparate souls, brought together by nothing more than the need to convince each other that what each of them believes is actually true.

On that last point, he's right. Just as Friend One didn't enjoy affirmation of faith in music for its own sake, Friend Two saw it as superfluous in the church setting. But I'd say both of them are wrong to condemn speaking to one another in encouragement. We need this in a world where we're beset on all sides with attacks on what our faith suggests.

But aren't they right to ask the church for a shred of authenticity and vulnerability? If music is expressive of the desires of our hearts, and Christians have found the deepest secret to the universe, shouldn't our poetry be multidimensional enough to impress the outsider with the beauty of what the idea of God implies? If worship is how that awe and devotion is put on display, shouldn't those outside be enraptured by the exhibition?

What both of these friends want is authenticity. They want to know that they can be a believer and still be themselves, failures and all. God has accepted us, just how we are. Outsiders need to know this, so they can know that he'll accept them too. They need to see the genuine article.

Free Music, New Features on My Blog

2009-02-14T15:03:00.005-05:00

I've just won a wrestling match with my blog. After much bloodshed, I finally updated the sidebar content with square buttons that link to my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube sites and the RSS feed of my blog posts.

Many people who come to this site probably don't know that I play music, so I've added a music section in the sidebar just below the network section. There, you can listen to or download 10 of my songs.

I plan to eventually add more, but it'd probably help if I recorded them first. Hopefully, once I have a tidy compendium of songs, I'll set up a donate button where I allow free downloads but ask people to donate to some charitable cause in China. I'm not a full-time musician and have no desire to be one, so I can only spend the time and effort to produce music if I know it's going to be bettering people's lives.

Let me know what you think of the music and the look of the designs on the right, even if you think both are horrendous. I'm just happy I was able to pin this down and that my blog didn't make me tap out before I got it done.

Faces, not Statistics

2009-02-11T21:24:00.006-05:00

Bangladesh has about 160 million people - more than half the U.S. population - crammed into a landmass roughly the size of Iowa. Panama has about 3.2 million, less than the Atlanta metro area. Chile, that skinny border of a country that snakes down South America's western spine, has nearly 16 million people, arguably a million or two less than Shanghai, China.

China, of course, is the most populous country in the world, with anywhere between 1.2 and 1.5 billion depending on which way the wind's blowing on the day you ask.

I could go on, but I think I've made the point that I know way too many country populations off the top of my head. This isn't a weird hobby. It's a natural effect of working as an international business reporter, where I write daily about well-known countries like South Korea (almost 50 million people) or more obscure ones like Mongolia (about 2 million. Okay I'll stop. Really.)

There's a tendency, for me at least, with all this focus on macroeconomics, to forget the people that make up the masses we call populations and that depend on this money we call economy to survive. When I stare at the computer screen too long, writing about faraway places without visiting them, people become statistics, big crowds, not living souls who have hopes, fears and dreams.

It's impossible for any human being to try to remember every face he sees, and no one would expect us too, especially after we've visited a place like China, where you can see hundreds of thousands in one day. So we compartmentalize. We formulate a ranking system, kind of like a criminal lineup or a forensic database, to rate the faces in order of importance. Family faces are usually at the top, friends usually toward the middle, and acquaintances on the lower rungs, filed under "People I kind of care about."

Luckily, the database in each of our brains is different. Like a social networking Web site, our face files often overlaps with those of the other members of our social circle. But sadly, that's where we think it ends, like the shore of a lake stops the water's sprawl toward land. We act as if our personal borders are the high-fenced places where caring should end. For those beyond our walls, we're just too busy.

I like to believe something different, though. We don't see it often (maybe the fences are too high) but our social circles, those compilations of faces that we notice, are like ripples in huge ocean, linked together and ever expanding across the surface of humanity. It's kind of like the six degrees of separation thing. Everyone is interconnected.

This hit home while I was driving the other day with the window down. I heard a bird here and there, but mostly it was the squeal of the bus's breaks or the roar of a car's engine that caught my ear. Although traffic noises aren't generally the most soothing sounds, it was nice to hear signs of life outside my car. No radio advertisements. No music. No Chinese audio CD. Just people going about their daily lives, navigating this web we're tangled in together.

At that moment I thought about my travels to China, all the faces that I've seen in five trips there. It must be in the millions. I don't remember every one, but there are some indelible faces that I can't shake from my brain, images that have crept up into the "People I'll remember" file. One is a skinny 6-year-old girl with a shaved head who was obsessed with ears and could say one English word: apple. Another is a girl who looked like she might be 3 years old, left unattended on a concrete staircase in a remote village. Still another is an old man with ratty clothes, smiling as we walk away from the hovel where he shared his family's harvest of watermelons with us.

When those faces flashed through my brain, I sort of felt sad, like I was letting them down by not remembering them more often. These are people, not numbers; faces, not statistics. They are in someone's circle, and they're as dear to their families as my wife and mother are to me.

Not only should I care about them in this general sense, but if I believe that this life is only a segue into eternity, shouldn't I pull out all the stops in putting them on the narrow path that leads to life?

There are more than 6 billion people in this world, 6 billion faces, all shapes and colors. God loves every one.

Photo: Yunnan Province, China. Copyright Brad Kinney 2006.

Living in the Trenches

2009-01-20T08:28:00.005-05:00

The Gospels tell us a lot of things about Jesus' life. He's born of a virgin, a performer of miracles, set apart, sinless and holy. But I think one of the most compelling things we learn about Jesus is not that he's pure, but in that purity he's not afraid to get dirty.

I say that not in the metaphysical, super-spiritual sense that he left his pristine home in heaven to descend to the lowly earth. I mean that Jesus even goes beyond this. He dives into this ocean of sin and death and heads straight for the bottom-feeders.

In Luke, Jesus talks about how the Pharisees wouldn't be satisfied with John the Baptist's behavior, nor would they accept his own. John abstained from food and drink, and he was said to have a demon. Jesus ate and drank, and he was called a glutton and an alcoholic. The Pharisees wanted to distance themselves from both, because they didn't know which was right.

I fear that Christians do the same thing sometimes. In our efforts to "save our witness," we forget to minister to the people who actually need it. We're like doctors with tourniquets and gauze, watching an injured person bleed to death because we don't want to risk infection or get bacteria on our instruments.

Jesus hung out with tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners and the lowest of the low. Am I advocating that you head down to the nearest street corner and get a new posse? Not necessarily. But I am saying that we should not let our fear of filth keep us out of the trenches. No one ever heard of a good soldier shying away from dirt and grime. No one respects a baseball player who won't dive for the ball because he doesn't want grass stains.

If we're secure in our righteousness, like Jesus was, we don't have to ask permission to share it with others. Like the Pharisees, those who judge are probably not in a position to receive the self-effacing message of Jesus. So why try to please them? And why waste your time on folks who think they're healthy when sick patients are calling for your help?

Situations must be judged with a spirit-led conscience, and we need to be shrewd about the positions we put ourselves in. I would venture to say that most of us don't have Jesus' discipline, so it's not smart to charge toward a sinful environment where we can't handle the pressure.

But get the point of what I'm saying: Without decay, the salt is for nothing. Without darkness the light is for nothing. Why have an antidote if you can't go where the poison has taken root? Let's not quarantine ourselves from the world. If we do, we might live more satisfied with ourselves. But it's God who will judge our impact on the world. Sometimes he'd rather see us in the trenches than dwelling safely in self-built palaces.

Braves Update

2009-01-16T11:31:00.003-05:00

We've posted our story about the Atlanta Braves' new Japanese pitcher Kenshin Kawakami on GlobalAtlanta. Here are some photos I took of the event and an interview I conducted with the Japanese consul general about his love for the Braves and how Kawakami will be able to adapt his new community here.

A Brave Afternoon

2009-01-13T22:45:00.002-05:00

The international business news wheel slowed its churning today and gave me a rare break from common subject matter like company relocations, trade statistics and foreign office openings. Today, I got to time travel and work at the same time.

I attended a press conference at Turner Field where the Braves announced the signing of the franchise's first Japanese-born player, a pitcher named Kenshin Kawakami who played for the Chunichi Dragons in Nagoya, Japan, before signing with the Braves in the past few days.

The time travel began when Braves skipper Bobby Cox walked in. He's portrayed as a fiery character in the media. He has a strong propensity to argue with umps and end up getting thrown out of games (I think he holds the record). But well after the press conference, he stood around chatting with reporters and other folks, talking about mundane stuff like the weather and the differences between Japanese and American baseball.

I ambled over. He looked me in the eye, nodded and said hello. Here I was, standing next to a guy I've watched on TV for nearly 20 years. I still remember the days of old. I can still see the iconic highlight reel: Francisco Cabrera's pinch-hit single in the NLCS and Sid Bream's slow slide across home plate, Skip Caray shouting "Braves win! Braves win!" as they beat the Pirates to go from "worst to first" in 1991. They played the Twins in the World Series, and Bobby was calling the shots for one of the first of many seasons throughout the 90s when title hopes were dashed for Braves fans.

Now Bobby was two feet from me, and I could ask him anything. I stayed on the previous subject - how the styles baseball styles of the two countries differ.

"I think they play for the one-run a little more," he told me, highlighting how the Japanese gravitate toward team play, presumably insinuating that American teams tend to have more individualistic players. Chicks dig the home run, and it puts people in the seats. I guess the baseball field is a microcosm of our two cultures: subtle and group-oriented vs. unapologetically individualistic.

There were other highlights to the event. Kawakami was fun and charismatic. His opening remarks included a "y'all" before switching to Japanese.

But he was serious about contributing to his new team. He just arrived Sunday, so he hasn't met any of them yet, but he said he's foregoing the World Baseball Classic in March to get ready for the season. When asked whether he was feeling pressure as a de facto ambassador for Japan, the answer was no. When asked what made him think we was ready for this level of play, he said he puts his "soul" into every pitch. He even brought along a square sheet of paper where he'd written in calligraphy the character for "soul."

For his first lunch in country, Kawakami ate a cheeseburger and hot dog at the Varsity. Talk about welcoming the guy to America. The next day, he coincidentally sat next to former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young at a dinner. I hope my new friend Bobby likes the way he pitches. Apparently Bobby has only seen Kawakami pitch on film, not in person. I thought it astounding that the scouts had so much clout that they could recommend a guy and the team could sign him before the manager has even seen him throw in the pen.

The baseball angle is good, but GlobalAtlanta needs something more focused, yet simple: The Georgia-Japan relationship has progressed to the point that there is enough cultural influence to help Mr. Kawakami feel right at home. At least that's what Braves General Manager Frank Wren and Japanese Consul General Takuji Hanatani told me.

New Korea Video

2009-01-13T02:15:00.003-05:00

My latest video project for GlobalAtlanta.com is a report on Korean media outlets in Atlanta and how they highlight Georgia's thriving Korean community. It particularly focuses on the Korea Daily, a nationwide newspaper in South Korea with a circulation of nearly 2 million. The JoongAng Ilbo, as it's called in Korean, opened an Atlanta bureau in late 2007 and now has 80 employees, though it's struggling along with other print papers like the AJC.

Back in South Korea, I'm told that the Korea Daily shares the spotlight with the Korea Times in a perennial battle over who's the biggest and best. The Korea Times also has a bureau in metro Atlanta.

A Token of Protection

2009-01-11T10:00:00.003-05:00

Smaller than a penny and lighter than a dime, the piece of metal Liz handed me wasn't very substantial. In her mind and heart, though, this token carried the weight of God's protection.

I had stepped into Liz's domain, a Spectrum store in Columbus, to grab some caffeine before hitting the road back to Atlanta at 2 a.m. She milled behind the counter and we began to talk when she asked me what I was looking for and whether she could help me.

I plunked a Starbucks double shot on the counter, and she knew I was in for a long journey. That's when she forked over the oval-shaped coin that featured the likeness of the Virgin Mary. It would protect me on the trip if I'd keep it close at hand, she said. These days, you never know what awaits you on the open road.

I immediately saw this as an opportunity, not to prove her wrong or to make myself feel better, but to speak some truth into a lady that was obviously filled with faith, albeit probably not in the right things.

"Thanks," I said, taking the silver-colored piece. "I really appreciate this. But I believe in Jesus, and I believe that God will protect me, whether I have this or not."

She replied with something about honoring Mary and something else along the lines of "a little extra protection couldn't hurt."

Though cloaked in Christian imagery, I recognized this as basically the same idea that I'd seen Buddhists cling to in southern China. If we just hold onto these images, then evil spirits, forces and influences will have no access to our lives.

"The problem is that by saying you need something extra, aren't you saying that God's power is not enough?" I said this as tactfully as possible.

I don't say the following to act as though I was winning an argument, because it was more of a cordial discussion than a dispute, but at this point she began to stumble over her words, talking about how trusting in this token is like having your mom's protection in addition to your dad's. Her gist was that Mary gives an added bonus to the protection God has, that when he sees this token, he sees your faith.

Apparently my comment about God's sufficiency didn't stick, but I saw one more opportunity to speak truth:

"It's not that I believe that we shouldn't honor Mary. God chose her to bear Jesus and said she was highly favored among women. But when she and Jesus' brothers went to see him, what did he say? He said, 'those who do the will of my father are my mother and my brothers.' She, then, though worthy of our admiration, is not any higher than any other believers."

She wouldn't be reasoned with, but the two-minute conversation never got heated. Katy was waiting in the car, so I took the token and hurried out. It was in my wallet, but I believe God was the one who ushered us safely back to Atlanta.

Year in Review

2009-01-10T22:57:00.002-05:00

In the Old Testament, it seems like every time you turn the page, God does something amazing, and the Israelites pile up stones to commemorate the event.

I don't have many boulders lying around, but I have been keeping a journal this year. This post is a review of some of the things God did and allowed me to do in 2008.

Travel

After an international travel drought in 2007, I made return trips to two countries I love this year, both to do some reporting for GlobalAtlanta.com:

-China - Most Americans hit up Beijing and Shanghai during their first trips to China. I visited the capital on my fourth trip there, in 2006. See all those posts here.

On March 30, 2008, I took Delta's inaugural flight to Shanghai to report on the new flight and the Georgia trade mission in conjunction with it. Check the GlobalAtlanta blog.

At a dinner celebration on arrival night, I got to meet Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue. Strange that I had to meet him in across the world and not in Atlanta.

The 14-hour flight was packed on the way over, pretty much empty on the way back. I only stayed in China from Monday through Thursday morning, traveling with other reporters for the first two days and roaming around by myself on the last two. The rest of the group - most of the press and the trade delegation - went on to Beijing. I returned to Atlanta and spent Friday recovering from jet lag.

This China trip was a strange one for me. It lasted less than a week, and no city-hopping was involved. I'd visited three or more cities on all of my other times in country. In 2006, that number reached into the double digits.

-Panama - This year's Panama trip was also a bit different than the last. In March 2006, I journeyed into Panama's wild side. Our main destination was an island off the country's Pacific Coast called Coiba. It was a former penal colony, kind of like a more remote and less humane Alcatraz, where leaders stowed dissidents in paltry living conditions. The prison is now closed, and the island is a protected national park.

In 2008, it was all business. Tagging along with a Kansas City trade delegation, my boss and I learned the ins and outs of the port companies and the railroad operating near the Panama Canal. We also learned about the Canal's imminent expansion, hoping to gauge how its ability to handle larger ships would impact the port in Savannah, Ga.

It was interesting to see the highly developed parts of Panama, a country where 40 percent of the population is said to be in poverty. We went to Colon, a free trade zone in the north, and made the rounds in Panama City. Summary of the trip here.

My favorite part of the trip was the reception at the ambassador's residence. We got there early to film an interview with U.S. Ambassador William Eaton, who only had a few months before his departure.

-Savannah - In June, Katy and I made a four-day excursion to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary in Georgia's oldest city.

-Louisville, Kentucky - My cousin asked my to sing before her wedding in August, so I told her I would. I took a day off from work so we could arrive for the rehearsal Friday night. The next day, I pulled off the song well, and she was hitched. The road trip there and back had some interesting twists, like a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville.

Meetings

The list of interesting people I wrote about - like U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and three Latin American presidents - and met - former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young - and the instances of access I got last year as a reporter is literally too long to put down here. I'll refer you to the blog posts in August and October where I boasted on the subject.

Books

Reading is essential for the writer. Here are some of the books I read this year:

-Digital Photography Book
-Screwtape Letters (a perennial favorite) by C.S. Lewis
-Mao: A Life, a 600+ page biography of the late Chinese communist leader Mao Ze Dong
-Another Mao bio, this one only about 200 pages
-Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge, another must-read every year
-To Own a Dragon and Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
-Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
-The Millionaire Next Door
-The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
-Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
-Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and others.

Music

No new recordings, but I did play at a few weddings during the summer. I've been writing a lot, and I got a new microphone for Christmas, so I should be recording some new music pretty soon. Check out some of my old stuff here.

Writing

I wrote probably more than 200 articles in 2008 for GlobalAtlanta. If you go to the Web site, you'll see that about every other article has my byline.

I also freelanced a good bit, at least by my standards. Breakaway, a Focus on the Family magazine for teen guys, was good repository for stories about missions, facing fear, divorce, the myth of invincibility, adventure and manhood. Check out my first and most recent articles, the only two published on the Web so far.

A Year of Adjustment

2009-01-07T21:40:00.005-05:00

The year 2008 was a year of adjustment for me. When it began, I'd been married for six months and working as an international business reporter for a few weeks less than that.

As with all years past, there are many items on my list of resolutions that were left undone. Instead of losing weight and toning my body, I put on a few extra pounds. Instead of mastering Chinese, I couldn't translate my passion for the language into the discipline I needed to study. And while I know with my head that my spiritual life needs the most investment of all, I really did little to feed it.

Am I resigned to these failures? Am I happy with them? No, but in the blur that was 2008, I at least can say that I realized their importance in a greater way than ever before. I turned 24 last October, and now that 2009 is here, I can no longer say "last year" when someone asks when I graduated college or got married.

That does weird things to my psyche. It's like a secondary adolescence. I feel really grown up at times. I have all the responsibilities someone my age should, and I'm handling them well. But part of me still wants to go dumpster diving with my buddies in the middle of the night.

While I'll never let my adventurous heart die, this year has helped me realize that while growing up is hard, it's not all bad.

There are a lot of awesome things about becoming a man. Your wife often rewards you with awesome food. And there's freedom, albeit a different kind that the kind college offers. I can't drive across the state for a concert or skip work like I did class, but I have real money, and that provides a lot of opportunities that scraping the barrel doesn't.

I have a mentor who speaks in metaphors, similes and old sayings. When I got married, he said I should live the first year as if I were a soldier in the Israelite army. In that culture, newly married men got furlough of one year to live happily with their new wives before venturing off to defend the kingdom. My year has long expired. This year, it's time for battle.

Not Invincible

2009-01-05T17:20:00.003-05:00

I learned the hard way to savor every opportunity for evangelism. Click here to read how God used a high school tragedy to shake me from apathy and show me that although I'm young, I'm not invincible, and neither are the lost friends and classmates around me.

The article is in the January 2009 issue of Focus on the Family's Breakaway magazine for teen guys. I'm a regular contributor and have written many feature articles using stories from my life to teach about subjects like dealing with divorce, taking responsible short-term missions trips, facing fear, trusting God's supremacy and becoming a man.

My first article recounted my adventures sharing the gospel on a backpacking trip in a restricted Asian country. After being detained and released by border police, I got a taste of how adventurous the Christian life could be if I got off the pew and into the real world.

Details of that journey can be found on this blog by clicking here.

Preparation: The First 30 Years

2009-01-04T19:53:00.005-05:00

I'm six years away from 30. I feel like I've lived a pretty interesting and full life. It certainly hasn't lacked drama and action, but I still believe I have a lot left to do. There's much I have missed in my first 24 years, a lot I should've done better, tons more projects and deeds left undone completely.

It's not that I lack ambition or drive. I can't remember a big goal that I set in earnest but haven't achieved. I'm married and well on my way toward a happy family. College was a breeze; sports always came pretty easily. I'm a published writer with a pretty stable, exciting and largely stress-free job. Things are good.

Still, there's something nagging me. There's a sense that follows me - poking me like a cattle prod, yanking me like the bit in the horse's mouth - that where I am at present is not my final destination. Things are good, but they could be better. Things are good, but are they just what God had planned when he crafted my gifts, talents and personality?

To that last question, I think the answer is no. Some people call it a calling, when you've found the thing you know you were made to do, that occupation that puts you where the world's needs and your abilities intersect at the highest levels. I'm wondering whether this calling is something you hear, or just something you discover along the way.

For people like Moses and some other fathers of the faith, the calling was quite literal. God spoke and said the Egyptian-raised Israelite would have his destiny wrapped up in his ancestral people. Abraham, the father of that nation, was called to leave his homeland and settle in a foreign place. In the New Testament, Paul was called through a blinding vision to become the apostle to the Gentiles, a mission that would consume the rest of his life.

Others seem to just have fallen into their fates. Joseph was sold into slavery and ascended from the prison to the Egyptian throne, preserving the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel during a great famine. Jonah could run from Nineveh, but he couldn't hide from God's plan. Rahab the prostitute was simply at the right place at the right time. She deceived the authorities of Jericho and her family was spared.

The common denominator in these stories is that each of the characters fulfilled the purpose that God had laid out for them, whether it felt like they were willingly following an external call or being pulled by an unseen magnetic field to what God demanded from their lives. In one sense, this is encouraging. If God's got things under control, if he's working the puppet strings I'm dangling from, then I'll probably end up where he wants me to be.

But I don't want to get there floating on a current. I want to be deliberate. I want to have full map, a compass, and maybe even a GPS.

The problem is that God's blueprint for life sometimes seems kind of like a road trip I took a few years ago. My friend Evan and I are trying to visit all the Major League Baseball stadiums, and we were planning to knock out three more. We were trying to get to a Mets game in New York City. Shea Stadium, where the Mets play, is in Queens.

As I was driving on the freeway, New York's endless horizon of buildings came into view. Evan had always been the navigator, and we'd always relied on a certain trusty atlas to guide us to stadiums. Only this time, Evan forgot the atlas. He'd printed directions online instead.

"So where to, Ev?" I asked, assuming he knew the way to Shea.

"Umm, I only got directions to New York City," he said. By this time we were in the middle of the city, a sea of people passing on the sidewalks, cars honking, swerving, almost nailing us from every angle. We had no clue where we were.

"To New York City? Are you serious?!" We just had to laugh. We called a friend who used an online mapping program to get us to Queens in time for the eighth inning.

God's map for us is like the folded sheet of paper Evan printed from Mapquest: limited in scope. He only tells us one destination - one phase of life - at a time, and like colorful little gamepieces moving toward the winner's circle, our next move doesn't become clear until His current objective or lesson is accomplished.

The hard part about this is that we're always being prepared for something, but we don't know what crisis we're gearing up for until it hits.

To me, it's a little scary to think that much of my day to day journey is preparation for something grander. If I have this much time to spend on preparation, what great task must I be called to? And what if I screw it up? What if I'm not preparing like I should be? What if I'm eating Twinkies and watching TV when I should be following Rocky Balboa on jogs through the Siberian wilderness and doing sit-ups on 24/7?

We know that Jesus lived on earth for about 33 years. Scholars generally agree that he began his ministry at about 30 years old. That means 10/11 of Jesus' life was spent preparing for his destiny, not living it like we see in the pages of scripture. At 12 years old, he was in the synagogue sparring intellectually with the religious leaders, but it's unclear as to what he did with the rest of his time as a child and young adult.

For some reason, it makes me feel good to know that Jesus (as far as we know) wasn't casting out demons before he could speak. God in the flesh had to pay his dues, had to be tempted in every way, do chores, share with younger siblings, buy groceries and work on carpentry projects with Joseph to help build the family business.

As God, Jesus knew his fate. As man, he marched toward it slowly.

I'm six years away from 30. I don't know my fate, but may I be content to move to the next destination and enjoy the preparation the same way our Savior cherished his first 30 years.

Photo: Shea Stadium, behind home plate. Copyright Trevor Williams, 2007

The Interpreter

2008-12-31T02:06:00.003-05:00

Ever since Babel's tower, learning languages has been the main hurdle in cross-cultural communication.

At that time, man's pride was so audacious that he felt he could do anything, even build a stairway to God's dwelling place. It's interesting that God recognized man's nearly limitless potential, and to hear the Bible tell it, he had to twist their tongues to keep them from reaching it.

Generations in the future, even with all our advances in computers and technology, our inability to talk to each other still limits our capacity to work together across borders.

In college, I thought I'd take a step toward fixing that by learning Chinese. I had been on missions trips to China and felt I'd have a better chance at communicating with sensitivity on future journeys if I used the people's heart language. Not to mention that it would help me travel, and it wouldn't hurt my job prospects if I could speak a language that almost a sixth of the world's population uses every day.

It's been hard. Chinese is a tonal language, and a word like ma can have 5 different meanings depending on the inflection of the voice. Chinese is also monosyllabic, meaning one word is usually one syllable, represented by one character. But today's Mandarin Chinese employs a lot of compound words like feiji, the word for airplane. "Fei" means to fly, and "ji" means machine, forming the literal and quite logical "flying machine."

Even with my struggles, I've had one strength in Chinese that a lot of foreigners don't have (and I'm only saying this because people have told me so): I can keep myself from imposing a standard of what the language should and shouldn't do based on my English-tinged mind.

The point of learning a foreign language is that it's foreign, something outside the realm of what your mind has processed before. This is both the maddening and the beautiful part of tackling the task of conversing in a different tongue. Getting there can be tough, but even in little victories you feel like you've opened up another identity, taken up a new self and joined an exclusive club.

Following God is like that, too. He's so holy, set apart, so other, that everything about his character is incomprehensible to us, infinitely more difficult to understand than Greek or Chinese to the English speaker.

I think it's pretty obvious that spiritually, weakness, sin and selfishness are our vernacular, and it's going to take some hefty studying in life to get to the point where our conversations are seasoned with salt and productive for his kingdom.

I like to say I'm "studying Chinese," probably because it makes me sound impressive and exotic (to people who don't already know better). Truth is, I rarely pick up my many Chinese books, and I've failed to get a language partner who can help smooth my conversational skills.

The same goes for learning God's language. The vocabulary of forgiveness, grace and peace pop up in my head too infrequently. The textbook is often too heavy on unfamiliar themes. I rarely speak to God on his terms or listen when he pronounces how I should order my steps. A language is a way of life, and I disregard with my actions that which I desperately desire to master in my head.

Good thing God sent an Interpreter who makes plain the complex realities of who God is. His Word is my spiritual dictionary.

Living Water

2008-12-29T01:47:00.005-05:00

America has two obesity problems. Along with our bellies, our billfolds are getting fat, flabby and out of shape.

Just as eating good food isn't bad, padding our pockets isn't necessarily a negative thing. But gorging ourselves leads to weight gain, causing health problems that could be avoided with exercise and a smart and disciplined diet.

Financially, it's the same principle. Hoarding our wealth is a symptom of selfishness, a stem that sprouts out of the roots of pride and selfishness. Building a fortune to serve ourselves, to prop up our comfortable lifestyles, causes clogs in the arteries that lead from our heart to God's and undue strain on the system that circulates his love and ideas throughout our lives.

Today I've been listening to the audiobook of "Revolution in World Missions," a semi-autobiography by the founder of a ministry I support called Gospel for Asia. The ministry seeks to mobilize native missionaries throughout Asia to bring the name of Jesus to their own people.

K.P. Yohannan, the author of the book and the founder and president of GFA, describes the vision as a cost-effective and timely way to reach the most unreached peoples of the world with culturally relevant Gospel teaching. He pits this idea against the paradigm of Western missions, sending "blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white people" to areas throughout the globe where their presence is often unwelcome or forbidden.

In these situations, Mr. Yohannan argues, it often takes years to learn language, secure the requisite immigrant status, build relationships, learn cultural mores, and finally, to plant churches. Gospel for Asia operates by cultivating trained native missionaries who are ready to go to their own people for a fraction of the cost of Western missionaries, if only someone will send them.

A native of the Indian state of Kerala, Mr. Yohannan didn't come to America until he was college-aged. He didn't speak English until he was 16. He'd always heard about American affluence but finally experienced it when he came to study on scholarship at a seminary in Dallas. To make a long story short, he was appalled by the way that U.S. citizens went about their days with little idea of how filthy rich they really were.

One day's meat for us was enough to feed an Asian family for a week, he said. A $3 latte at Starbucks is the equivalent of three days' wages for more than a billion people living in poverty. After meetings where he spoke about the lost and dying, he was shocked to note that the after-church meal he ate often cost more than what he had collected in his love offering for the support of native missionaries who were suffering for Christ.

In fairness, Mr. Yohannan isn't all self-congratulating. He grapples with these issues in the text, and he admits the failures when he fell into the same traps. But his message is clear and unabashed: The Church in the U.S. and other wealthy Western nations has been financially blessed so that it can help faithfully bankroll the work of reaching the lost for Christ in some of the most untouched places.

GFA has grown tremendously out of this vision. A turning point in the ministry was creating $30/month (about a dollar a day) sponsorship plan so that a believer here can support a believer there. That remains a cornerstone of GFA's fundraising efforts.

The problem is that it's hard to get Americans to sacrifice anything. If the current financial crisis tells us anything about ourselves, it's that we haven't yet begun to loosen the grip that materialism has not only on our culture, but on our hearts as Christians and our churches as well.

I propose a way to combat this, and in the process, waistlines will likely slim.

We spend tons of money going out to eat every week, some of us more than others. For many, getting a drink with a meal is second nature, nevermind the fact that it usually adds about $2 to the bill and hundreds of calories that our waistlines are fighting hopelessly against.

Maybe we should try to only drink water (offered free at most establishments) when we eat out and put the money that we saved away so that we can support GFA or ministries like it. I think we'd be surprised at the millions we could raise so quickly and easily. Jesus said that there would be untold blessings for anyone who gives a cup of cold water to nourish his disciples. With this plan, we can even drink the water ourselves and still reap the spiritual benefit. It's dying to self in a small way. Starting here, it's possible that we could begin to walk the path of true, sacrifical giving that invests in God's kingdom rather than our own.

What does anyone out there think?

Click here to support a Gospel for Asia missionary.

Download "Revolution in World Missions" after you sign up for email updates.

Every Tribe and Tongue

2008-12-22T22:08:00.007-05:00

A new ministry is building an online community to expedite Jesus' goal of making disciples from every tribe and tongue.

Using open-source wiki technology and an army of volunteer translators, Gospel Translations is looking to provide online access to Gospel-focused books and articles in a variety of languages.

Wiki is a code framework used for collaborative Web sites like Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia where registered users can contribute and edit articles.

Gospel Translations builds its English library by partnering with ministries that allow the use of their copyrighted content (See list here). Then, volunteer translators convert the resources into other languages on the site.

The goal is to quickly and efficiently provide a knowledge base for Christian leaders in parts of the world where there is a dearth of suitable theological materials or where traditional print distribution hasn't kept up with the demands of the rapidly growing church.

The leaders of the effort say the Christian center of the world is shifting away from its traditional seat in the West as the evangelical populations of Africa, Asia and Latin America multiply exponentially.

In some of these areas, the Bible is the only Christian literature available. In places like China, many resources are published, but they're regulated by complex rules.

The emotional fervor of Christianity can spread like wildfire, but if a spiritual movement is not based on true discipleship, it's ultimately an exercise in fanaticism. Yes, God's Word has everything we need for the process of discipleship, but a broader base of knowledge provides protection against heresy and a check against the temptation to interpret difficult passages based on presupposition rather than truth.

The one spiritual commodity the West has available for export is biblical knowledge. What would my spiritual intellect be without the insight of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity? How would I have started to understand the supremacy of God in day-to-day life without John Piper's Don't Waste Your Life? If not for Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What, who would have colorfully explained the mystery and wonder of finding identity in the person of Jesus?

Resources like these need to escape the stuffy libraries of ungrateful and complacent hoarders like me. This new platform gives them a chance - through telephone lines, underground wires and fiber optic cables - to really spread their wings.

Projects have already begun in Arabic, Russian, Bahasa Indonesian and other languages, including an entire portal in Spanish. See the complete list of languages on the homepage.

Click here to become a translator.

Watch Gospel Translation's intro video below. It is an initiative of OpenSource Mission:

Potty Training

2008-12-22T00:05:00.005-05:00

My three-year-old niece is potty training. She did something really hilarious the last time we saw her. This is only funny because she is my niece, not my daughter.

She talks pretty well now, so she came and announced to us that she had to use the bathroom. Number 2, it was. So we all urged her to go sit on the potty and deal with the business that had arisen.

She didn't make it.

But she's a considerate lass. She walked into her bedroom and dug out the wet wipes, brought them back into the living room and handed them to her dad (my brother).

"Here's some wipes, daddy!"

We all burst into laughter. The consensus around the room was that if your daughter can hand deliver the means to cleaning up the mess, there's no reason it should have been created in the first place.

As amusing as that was, it's sobering to think that the same principle applies to me sometimes. God has given me guidelines. He's showed me the neatness of his commands, how his direction can save me from the soil of sin, apathy, passivity and laziness.

But many times, I don't make it. And my response is the same as my little niece.

"Daddy - Lord - Here are some wipes! Clean me up!"

God is a good father. If we come to him and ask to be cleaned, he washes us. But he probably shares a similar brand of amusement every time we fail. Shouldn't I be past the potty-training phase of Christianity?

Dumpster Diving

2008-12-18T02:28:00.003-05:00

My Fast-Food Cups Runneth Over

I just practically scored a free Coke out of a recycling bin. Yep, just plucked seven caps off the top of the heap. With the codes entered online, I'll be one cap away from a 20-oz.

You might think this is nasty, but it's just something I do. I scour Craigslist for free items that I might be able to use or sell. I check for deals online. And to a limit, I'll dig through trash. Some might say this is unhygienic, strange or just downright dirty. I tend to believe it's practical to take refuse and turn its latent value into treasure.

Just ask my friends. In college, four of us fashioned a dumpster-diving scheme that netted us some big bucks and high-flying benefits. A fast-food restaurant was giving away free airline tickets with drink purchases. The thing was, you had to accumulate the drink cups, cut out proofs of purchase and send them to the restaurant, which credited your account at the airline with the free trips.

Instead of purchasing the 64 drinks required for the round-trips, we decided to take a quicker route, cutting out that pesky middle man. We'd just get our plunder right out of the dumpster.

Now, it must be said that only college kids can come up with stuff like this. I make actual money now and have a real job that I wouldn't want to risk to spend all night knee-deep in discarded chili, wading through bags of grease and cups saturated with ketchup and other, unidentifiable substances.

But we had a few things going for us that made the perfect recipe for dumpster-diving success: a propensity to stay up late, a desire for mischievous adventure and a desperate need for cash.

I won't say we started small, for our first undertaking was a lofty feat. Armed with headlamps, latex gloves and garbage bags, we raided 13 dumpsters across at least five different cities. The idea for the initial mission was to get enough cups that we could all have two round-trip tickets throughout the continental U.S. When dawn broke, we were sitting on a stack of more than 500, enough for each of us to fly free to Seattle and back - twice.

With our hard-earned but rousing success, we began thinking of how we might further capitalize on our newfound and profoundly disgusting hobby. A light bulb went off in my brain. Ebay.

We checked the online auction site, and cups were going for more than a dollar a piece, sometimes for even more than it would cost to actually get a large Coke from the restaurant. Dollar signs began to dance in our heads. It was almost too much joy to take in, especially after the grueling sortie we had just endured. In our eyes, those yellow squares of cardboard printed on the cups were bricks of gold.

But all good things come with a price. Dumpster diving is not for the faint of heart - or stomach. Fast-food dumpsters are the repository for anything and everything that is unholy about American cuisine, if you can even dignify it with such a name. If hell had a specially tailored torture method for each of the senses, the smell test would employ the very odor emitted by those metal boxes of horror.

Inside the dumpster, a light undertone of ketchup permeates everything. Rotting burgers, flat sodas of various flavors, moldy chili, limp french fries and tossed salads create a vortex of olfactory assault that makes my innards churn even now. Every restaurant has a heavy black bag of the night's cooking grease. Eventually we made a game out of finding it, like a putrid Easter egg hunt.

We had to do something to stay entertained. You see, that first night only the beginning of month-long effort to gain as many cups as possible. We made a solemn pact not to share our discovery with outsiders. That way, no one could interrupt our supply. We'd split all the cups we got with the group, even if they were gained on an individual mission.

We devised a system to optimize the our cup-harvesting capabilities while diminishing the disgusting aspects of the job. We traded smaller latex gloves for the dish-washing variety that covered the whole forearm. We used headlamps to free up our arms. When dumpsters were full enough, we learned we could stand outside instead of plunging in. When we did have to enter, we'd throw cups out to other team members who'd quickly stash them in garbage bags. We'd process them later at home. Sometimes we split into teams of two and set out in opposite directions to cover a broader swath of north Georgia.

Soon, others began to catch on. We uncovered a cup-smuggling ring in Columbus, where a guy was bribing workers to hand over a nightly stash. In Commerce, we ran into a guy in the dumpster. We booted him out and jumped in, just to flee before the dump truck emptied the dumpster's contents into its trailer.

The Athens market was saturated with scavengers and soon dried up. The promotion finally ended. We had gathered more than 2,000 cups. We gave the tickets we won as gifts or sold them on Ebay. Even after expenses and a botched Ebay deal, each of the four of us still walked away with $364 and two round-trips.

You can't beat free business class on the way back from your honeymoon in Arizona. As I looked beyond the curtain that separated me from the plebeians in coach, I raised my free glass of wine to fast-food and opportunistic friends.

18 Years Adrift

2008-12-14T11:33:00.003-05:00

I became a Christian at age 6. Impossible, you say? Not at all. Children understand better than adults the dynamics of punishment and the need to be rescued from it. And like Jesus said, kids are more likely to latch onto faith. This is rare for grown-ups, whose minds and hearts have been subjected to the gradual erosion of calloused education.

At that tender age, I only knew a few things. I had done wrong. I had acted against my parents' will. I had lied, cheated, stolen, hated, physically harmed others, discriminated, made fun of people, overindulged, complained, neglected God and acted in a generally selfish manner since the womb. Conviction, the nagging sense that I was imperfect, did not need to be proven from scripture. Experience was enough.

This guilt provided the foundation for faith. My step-dad was a pastor, and every week I heard about the option to leave guilt behind by trusting in Jesus and the work that he did through his cross and resurrection. This grace, this unmerited acceptance, was life's get-out-of-jail-free card, and I knew - however childishly- that I needed to break free from the prison of my young heart's crimes.

That's what led me to ask God to save me and to guide my life, allowing the punishment Jesus' received to become my own. Email me if you're curious...

We need the faith of a child to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus said as much. But he didn't intend that we keep drinking spiritual formula and never move on to solid food. At 6, I was saved, but there was no way I was a finished work. Just ask my elementary school teachers.

As I grew, I began to put flesh on my scrawny skeleton of faith. I memorized the order of the books of the Bible backwards, a useless skill to be sure, but impressive to fellow church members. I started highlighting things in my teen study Bible and really listening to sermons. As my spiritual digestive tract began to churn, I devoured books and conversations and teaching throughout high school.

In college, I weathered the intellectual assaults of Buddhism class and the evolutionary mindset of anthropology. I led Bible studies and played worship music. I raised money and traveled across the world to build God's kingdom. I built a network of like-minded believers.

I'm now 24, a year and a half out of college, with both feet in the real world. My intellect and my intentions are full of the words of God and a desire to do his will. I've now been a Christian for 18 years.

Still, I mostly fail.

I'm packed with ideas, knowledge and ability, but I see little fruit. I'm spurred on by compassion for the needy, but I don't act on their behalf. I burn for those who don't know the freedom of Christ, but I rarely tell them.

In many ways, I'm still adrift, floating backwards from the place I began at 6 years old. Then, I was enamored with God. I loved him and felt his comfort. I really knew something not just with my head, but with my heart.

I've moved onto solid food, but I've forgotten to devour each day the meat of the Gospel, that Christ has saved us from our misdeeds and brought us into freedom - not just from this detached notion of sin - but from ourselves. We no longer are slaves to the patterns of the world. We don't have to live the lie of self-indulgence. Like our savior, sacrifice is our fulfillment. Obedience is our mission and joy.

I pray God will reinvigorate my faith with the love of a child. Only then will my spiritual muscle spring into action.

Recent Meetings

2008-12-12T00:17:00.003-05:00

I've periodically updated this blog with boasts about some of the interesting people I've met or encountered in my day-to-day life as an international business reporter. The last update was August, so I figure it's time for another.

September-December

-Kursad Tuzmen - a charismatic leader who swam the Bosporus Strait, Tuzmen is Turkey's foreign trade minister. I didn't meet him, but I did see him at a breakfast with Coke CEO Muhtar Kent.

-Charles Stith - former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania under Clinton, now director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University. Just edited a book compiling writings from former African heads of state on the challenges that face the leaders of their respective countries.

-Antonio Patriota - Brazil’s ambassador the U.S. Mr. Patriota could've been high-brow, but he was a diplomat to the core, courteous and thoughtful, eloquent and pensive. I spoke with him uninterrupted for about 15 minutes at an event celebrating Atlanta's new Brazilian consulate. We talked about the state of Brazil-U.S. relations, energy in Brazil, his former diplomatic post in Beijing, and how he loves to go the High Museum of Art when he's in Atlanta.

-Pierre Vimont - French ambassador to the U.S. I had to present an award on behalf of my company to Mr. Vimont in front of an audience of more than a hundred people. Talk about nerve-racking.

-Shirley Franklin - Atlanta mayor. You can say a lot of things about Shirley, but you can't say she's not a nice gal. I spoke to her at the High Museum, where she told me that she was head of Atlanta's cultural affairs 25 years ago, her "favorite job."

-Henri Loyrette - the day after presenting our special report on the Louvre Atlanta partnership to the French ambassador, I got to meet Mr. Loyrette, the president and director of the Louvre. I interviewed him in front of a huge lion sculpture that leads into the Louvre Atlanta exhibit.

-Zhou Wenzhong - Chinese ambassador to the U.S. The High Museum has been a happening place in the past few months. I've covered the opening of the Louvre exhibit's final year there, and I was also on hand for a media preview of the terracotta army exhibition. The 2,200-year-old figures and related artifacts come from the tomb of Qin Shihuang Di, the first emperor who unified China's warrings states. See another attempt at a video report.

-Friis Arne Petersen - Danish ambassador to the U.S. I interviewed him before he gave a speech on what could potentially be a scary topic: the EU as a rising superpower.

-Paul Oram - Minister of business, Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Apparently they have more than just well-known dog breeds in the northeast Canadian province. Oil and gas was the "savior" when there was a moratorium on cod that paralyzed the economy and caused communities to shut down. Now, the province is diversifying.

-Faida Mitifu - Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the U.S. I found out she has a house in Columbus. She taught at Columbus State University and maintained her place there because she liked my hometown so much.

-Andrew Young - former Atlanta mayor, Georgia congressman and ambassador to the United Nations. I couldn't help but feel like I was sitting across from history. Mr. Young, a prominent civil rights activist in the 1960s and beyond, was there on the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.

-Tom Kloet - CEO of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Most of what he said I didn't understand. Let's just be honest.

-King Tut - a bunch of artifacts from the boy king's tomb have made their way to Atlanta. The exhibition at the Atlanta Civic Center puts Tutankhamun in the historical context of all the great pharaohs in an informative and entertaining way.

-Ojo Maduekwe - Nigeria's foreign minister. Mr. Maduekwe delivered a speech on Obama's election and its implications for Africa. He was very thoughtful and gracious enough to speak with my publisher and I to make sure we understand what's going on.

Solar Rip-off?

2008-12-10T22:03:00.002-05:00

One of the main impediments to the widespread adoption of solar energy is that it takes years for the energy savings generated by solar panels to offset their high-flying initial price tags, and the cost of photovoltaic energy compared to fossil fuels is astronomical.

Last year I went to a luncheon with the head of one of Germany's leading trade groups for photovoltaics. He said that a rooftop system would cost about $20,000 and would take two decades to pay for itself on average.

His solution? "We should not talk about instruments; we should talk about goals." See full article here.

Translation: Don't worry that the economic model that the Germans use would never work in the U.S. It's more important that we bow at the feet of today's renewable energy fad than think about the system's economic sustainability in the long run.

But according to articles I read recently in Foreign Policy and Time magazines, solar proponents recently have had the chance to have their cake and eat it too, thanks to new thin-film solar panels that can be produced for a fraction of what they used to cost.

Given the benefits these systems supposedly provide for a planet environmentalists say is in danger of overheating because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, this could be a huge breakthrough for the environmental movement.

But Foreign Policy's list of top 10 stories you didn't hear this year let's us in on a little secret. Nitrogen Triflouride, or NF3, a gas used in the production of these newfangled panels, is 17,000 times more powerful in contributing to global warming than CO2, and it might be in the atmosphere in greater abundance than previously expected.

It's still a blip on the global warming radar because it was not regulated under the famed Kyoto treaty and it's nowhere near as prevalent as CO2. Scientists worry this isn't the only gaseous culprit floating around out there. Check out the article for the details.

This reminds me of when the journal "Science" came out with a study earlier this year about how the hasty trend toward biofuels actually results in a net increase in greenhouse-gas emissions because rain forests - natural CO2 suckers - have been cleared to grow feedstocks for biofuels.

I'm all for protecting God's green earth. Let's just use our heads and look at the big picture as we make attempts to do so.

Ready for Heaven?

2008-12-09T01:01:00.006-05:00

As I pulled into the bank today, the radio was playing a Kenny Chesney song. He sang in his usual lighthearted twang, staying true to the beachy feel that runs throughout many of his hits.

He was singing about heaven, how everyone wants to go, but only after they've soaked up all this world has to offer.

"Everybody wanna go to heaven, but nobody wanna go now," he crooned.

Sad, I thought, but true. When most of us consider the idea of heaven that has been ingrained in our church doctrine and circulated through pop culture, our hearts sink.

The vision goes something like this: We die, leaving behind all those we love. Wings sprout from our backs and halos appear above our heads as our disembodied spirits ascend to a cloud where we'll laze around for eternity, playing harps and singing 1990s worship music as our bearded, venerable God basks in the praise while seated idly on his golden throne.

Or as Chesney sees it:

"Someday I want to see those streets of gold in my halo
But I wouldn’t mind waiting at least a hundred years or so"

Why not wait? If what we've believed is true, we're not missing out on much. Is it better than eternal suffering and everlasting fire that cannot be quenched? Sure. But not by much.

Randy Alcorn offers us a different view of heaven in his book by the same name. He explains why the image we've concocted is so disheartening, why the prospect of this ethereal dwelling place can't inspire us.

"We do not desire to eat gravel. Why? Because God did not design us to eat gravel. Trying to develop an appetite for a disembodied, non-physical existence is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel. No matter how sincere we are, and no matter how hard we try, it's not going to work. Nor should it" (7).

Instead, we desire what our savior has promised, through his word and actions. We are physical beings designed for a physical place. We want to live in communion with the resurrected Christ in a new body, on a new earth, and surprisingly to many of us, "our desires correspond precisely with God's plans."

Through a nearly 500-page comprehensive study filled with theological evidence and experiential research, Alcorn reconstructs a view of heaven as he interprets it from scripture.

Here's how he addresses a few misconceptions:

-Heaven, in its final state, will be on a resurrected earth, not in some galaxy far away.

-We will not be disembodied spirits. Instead, we will be like the resurrected Christ in body. He ate and allowed his disciples to touch him, but strangely he was also able to walk through walls.

-We will be restored to the dominion we were promised before the Fall. We will not become pudgy cherubs but will have real, tangible rewards, real territories to look after, real dominion over a real realm.

There is more. Alcorn makes it clear that we should not presume to know everything about heaven, but we can know something. We can use our imaginations to interpret our day-to-day experiences in a way that gives us glimpses of eternity.

In other words, when sin marred the earth, it didn't take away all that God had pronounced good. The taste of fresh fruit, conversation with the ones you love, beautiful scenery - they all point us back to God's ideal, the perfection that we've lost through the decay of sin but which Jesus will restore when he comes again and institutes his kingdom on earth.

Part of the reason we have trouble seeing this is that we've made Christianity more about tenets than the experience of the Gospel, more about articles of faith than the trust and hope they're supposed to point us to.

Christianity is not just right in an intellectual sense, like bullet points you'd use in a throwdown argument with an atheist. Christianity jives with the way we all experience the world, and it explains things that we know inherently.

-We're screwed up, unable to do what we know is right.
-We long for community but are terrible at fostering it.
-We desire beauty, safety, love, adventure and peace, and we notice when those things are lacking.
-We've had thousands of years of history, and our basic inclination toward self has not changed.

Jesus fixes our sin for us. He gives us sacred communion through sacrificial love. He tells us that the beauty we desire is a foretaste of things to come. Through his death, he shows us how submission and obedience to God's will frees us from the bondage that comes with self-love.

In essence, all the things we long for at our core are restored when God's will is done earth as it is in heaven.

So don't lose heart. Eternity is adventure that's already begun to happen.

For more, check out the resources at Randy Alcorn's Eternal Perspectives Ministries.

Photo: Meditation in Xinjiang province, China. Copyright Trevor Williams, 2006.

Will Smith's Guide to Marriage

2008-12-05T01:04:00.003-05:00

It's hard to believe, but actor Will Smith recently turned 40. It seems like only yesterday that the Fresh Prince was rapping his way into hearts across America, terrorizing Bel Air with his West Philadelphia ways.

Now, he's one of the most sought-after movie stars on the planet. His films have grossed more than $5 billion around the world.

Barbara Walters interviewed Big Willie Style for her special on 2008's Most Fascinating People, which aired tonight.

He's gotten wiser with age. After a failed first marriage, he tied the knot with Jada Pinkett Smith, and he's got a new outlook that all of us married folk could learn from, especially in a country where half of our "lifelong" commitments fail.

On his second time around, Smith says, divorce is not an option.

"If divorce is an option; you're gonna get divorced," he told Walters. Spoken like a man with four decades of experience, and I don't think he was acting this time.

UGA Still Top 5 in One Ranking

2008-12-04T11:54:00.005-05:00

While the University of Georgia has fallen from its preseason perch at the top of the college football rankings to No. 17 after its loss to rival Georgia Tech, the old alma mater is still top 5 in one important ranking.

For 2007-08, UGA had the fifth-highest amount of students enrolled in study abroad programs of any school in the country, public or private. Georgia's flagship institution doubled the techies in that regard, 2086 to a meager 1001.

That doesn't take the sting (pun intended) away from Tech's 45-42 victory and UGA's freefall over the course of the highly anticipated 2008 football season, but at least we can take pride that we'll have a globally minded, highly educated state population.

Because that's what everybody cares about on the weekend of the SEC championship game, right?

Forbidden Fruit

2008-12-02T14:49:00.002-05:00

I've solved the mystery. The forbidden fruit that caused the fall of man was not an apple. It was definitely a pomegranate.

The sinfully sweet and sour sphere is amazingly tart and delicious. I had my first one today. After Katy chopped in half and picked out a few seeds, she turned it over to me, warning me that my shirt would suffer its splatter of red wrath if I wasn't careful.

I wasn't. My shirt paid dearly. It's now tossing and turning in the washing machine, and I hope the detergent can destroy the splotchy evidence of my carelessness.

Despite the way it mercilessly marred my shirt, I couldn't stop eating the pomegranate. I kept going until I ruined an undershirt as well.

As I was digging out seeds with a paring knife, deep crimson juice running over my fingertips, I couldn't help but sympathize with Adam. How could he have resisted when Eve was holding this in her hands?

How ridiculous they must have looked when the Lord found them walking in the garden, mouths stained with red, fingertips looking as if they'd stabbed someone.

No wonder they hid. Pomegranates take commitment, and there is always collateral damage. There is no playing it off with a pomegranate. If they stayed in view, they'd be caught red-handed.

Gas-price Irony

2008-12-01T10:52:00.003-05:00

Many folks were attacking the Bush administration for high gas prices as they started skyrocketing this spring, in the midst of a heated election season where the candidates wanted to distance themselves from the incumbent by blaming him for any and all economic woes.

Some people thought that surely Bush, Cheney and their oil cronies were making a killing as prices went through the roof and consumers suffered at the pump to the tune of $4-plus per gallon.

According to a USA Today article, it turns out that gas stations are making higher profit margins as the price plummets because they're able to capitalize on a variety of factors not seen by the untrained - or unwilling - eye.

Wholesale prices are dropping faster than the gas stations have had to lower retail prices, and the stations pocket the difference. Convenience store sales are up because people are returning to the pump more often because they want to buy gas after prices have fallen even more. For more factors, read the article.

Just goes to show you that the rhetorical winds from politicians usually blow the listener away from nuance and more towards dogma, impairing the ability to judge a situation based on reality. May we - on both sides of the aisle - resist the urge to follow the herd at the expense of our critical thinking skills.

America the Beautiful

2008-11-29T23:11:00.005-05:00

Culture is a funny thing. The movement of people and their ways of life is bewildering to examine. How people structure their existence within a community and how geography and history shape that process is a subject you could study forever.

My job incorporates some of those elements. As an international business reporter for a local publication, I learn about new cultures and to examine how they interact with the modern American city in which I live, how they place their firm and distinct imprint on it, and how this swirling mass of humanity survives through this great global bartering system we call economy.

For all my pursuits in other countries, America has never lost its intrigue. Our country is a tapestry woven with threads of freedom and opportunity, pride and expansionism, brashness and humility, infamy and never-ending compassion. We have a lot of faces as a country. For some, we're imperialists. For our enemies, we're the terrorists. For the hungry, we're often the savior; for the oppressed, the lifeline.

To some, we're an enigma, the third-largest country by population but soaring above all others when it comes to wealth. We're a paradox, at once xenophobic and incredibly open. We have a history of suppressing the freedom of our own people, but because our founders recognized our evil, self-serving nature, we've managed to become the freest country on earth.

When immigrants come to this country, I imagine they sift through a flood of perceptions, their images of "America the Beautiful" influenced by the media, the people they've met, their country's relationship with ours and even their own expectations, which color perceptions as much as anything that's not actual experience.

They're probably drawn to the opportunity that the stars and stripes represent, but they probably fear that they'll be lost in the shuffle, trampled under the great English-speaking machine of society.

To balance the ambition and fear, they create communities within communities, little pockets of home miles away from where they were born.

Georgia is an interesting place to see these forces at work. I went to the mall on Black Friday, the most American of days, the day after the most American of holidays. Only in this country can we have a day to take stock of our overflowing abundance, only to rush out and buy more before the sun rises on Friday.

But I saw no backlash to this ethos among the hundreds, probably thousands, of foreigners I saw at Northlake Mall in Tucker. I must've heard 10 or more languages as I slalomed through the throngs of shoppers eager for that after-Thanksgiving bargain.

A Chinese lady told her daughter she looked great in that jacket she was trying on. The daughter agreed before commenting that the Old Navy store had "hao duo ren," a heck of a lot of people. A Mexican woman spoke of the "pavo grande" (large turkey) they cooked the day before. An Indian man from my apartment complex waited as the checkout line at Kohl's stretched halfway across the store.

An white guy remarked in a awestruck tone that the leather jackets were only a few more dollars than a leather belt. "Yeah, it's kinda crazy," I said, giving his indignance the indulgence it seemed to be seeking. "Naw, they're not crazy. They're smart as hell, but we're smarter."

Outside the store, Muslim women with dark skin and headscarves corraled their children, laughing as two families reunited. I walked further, and Mediterranean women tried to sell me skin products. A Hispanic woman gave me a sample at the Chinese restaurant, and I sat down to eat, dumbfounded by the diversity.

We live in an amazing time. The movement of cultures has never been so pronounced and widespread. Our country still offers opportunity for the persistent and refuge for the downtrodden. Many new faces are taking us up on the offer, and we're even more beautiful because of this.

Terracotta Army Video Report

2008-11-23T01:43:00.003-05:00

I'm still working on becoming a full-fledged media man. I've got the basics of writing down (notice, I said the basics), and now I'm delving more into the nitty gritty of new media and how to use the Web's capabilities to make the news come alive.

At GlobalAtlanta, we're incorporating more video and audio, which adds a different dimension to our reports. It's one thing to quote somebody like former Atlanta Mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, a historical figure who's admirable and at times controversial. It's another thing to let viewers see him say what he thinks.

Almost two weeks ago I got a chance to visit the "The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army," a group of 2,200-year-old artifacts from Xi'an, China. The life-size terracotta figures and other related artifacts are now on display at the High Museum of Art here in Atlanta.

More than 1,000 of these figures have been excavated since 1974, when farmers digging a well uncovered a corner of the vast tomb complex of the man historians believe to have first unified the heartland of what we now know as China. Archaeologists estimate that 6,000 more are buried, waiting to reveal more of the emperor's secrets.

This exhibition is really cool, as was the fact that President Jimmy Carter, the Chinese ambassador and other officials were on hand to kick things off. I put together the following video report to breathe life into my article about the exhibition. Check it out and let me know how I did:

Modern America

2008-11-20T00:24:00.004-05:00

I was talking with someone the other day about how amazing it must be for old people to see the changes that sweep through our world. Even in my 24 years, the times have become irrevocably different. The world has integrated beyond what anyone could have imagined, and with the Internet we've had a front-row seat to it all.

My generation, the computer-savvy, globally connected generation, has grown up in a post-WWII era where prosperity has been the operating paradigm, spoon-fed to us since we were born. As a result, the virtue of thriftiness is rarely found in our country, a dire symptom of our materialism shown even more clearly by recent turmoil in the financial markets.

The root of all these problems, the insidious foundation we build our culture of consumerism upon, is a lie. At its core, it's the idea that like winning the lottery, we can get something for nothing.

America tells my generation that it can build a house with no money down and "own" a car with a list of bad credit that runs longer than the buyer's morning commute. America tells my generation that health care is a right, that Uncle Sam will look after us because we can't take care of ourselves. America tell us that inefficiency will be rewarded with government support, while success will be indirectly and unfairly punished and discouraged.

America used to be the nation of innovation, where hard work and know-how came together to solve problems and to create the most competitive workforce in the world. We're still good at a lot of things, but unfortunately we've become too proficient at living the lie discussed above.

It must be hard for those who hoarded potatoes and scrounged to survive during the Depression to imagine this generation as destitute as they once were. We're nowhere near that point. Neither are we - even with these money crises - even remotely approaching heartfelt appreciation for the ease with which many of us have waltzed through life.

In our world, everything's in a can. Food gets tossed into our car from windows as we roll by the restaurant. We are the fast food nation, and that culture attaches itself to every segment of our society. It's a leech that sucks out our ability to recognize what's truly valuable - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Freedom does not mean government-subsidized ease. It means freedom, and that is enough.

Traveler Update

2008-11-20T00:09:00.004-05:00

Not too long ago I wrote this post about my first encounter with the Irish travelers, a mysterious and misunderstood people group that lives in a big village of mansions and trailers North Augusta, S.C.

Since that time, I've gotten an enormous response (at least by this blog's standards) from casual readers and actual travelers - some of them even from Belfast, Northern Ireland - who have stumbled upon the blog. They've been kind enough to offer their opinions about some of the ways they're perceived in their communities and clarify some of my misconceptions I've gained since reading about the travelers.

If I can get to Augusta again, I hope to interview some of them, but until then, check out the comments on the original post to see some firsthand accounts.

Now, if I could only get as many comments as I did on my Aga Khan piece...

Those Who've Gone Before

2008-11-04T12:11:00.008-05:00

I'm glad I didn't lug a book with me. I wouldn't have had time to read a page.

Despite predictions that voting could take more than three hours, I exercised my democratic right and duty today in only about 5 minutes. My polling place had absolutely no lines, and I quickly marked the box with an X to send McCain one step closer to victory in Georgia.

Our state is in the first round of poll closings (7 p.m.) and McCain will need a win here to defy the doomsday, landslide predictions and make this historic election closer than the experts think.

The fact that the lines were so short leads me to a few possible conclusions. One is that not as many folks turned out as expected. Generally, new voters tend to favor Obama, the change-monger, so if this could boost McCain's prospects. The more likely scenario is that the 40 percent of Dekalb County voters who cast their ballots early helped the rest of us avoid the tragic fate that befell some of them - lines of three to five hours.

What propelled so many to the polls early? I think it was a simple herd mentality, the fear that election day crowds would be too great. Funny that by succumbing to this sentiment, they actually created the scenario they wanted to avoid in the first place. I think the state government did a bad thing by pushing early voting and only opening select precincts that couldn't accommodate the crowds. This created the quagmires that suckered people in for such long waits. We should never have to wait two hours to vote. It's interesting that we have mismanagement of these processes and wonder why our turnout rates are so low.

If you were one of those who stood in line, I applaud your patriotism and I feel sorry for you, but I thank you for going before, preparing the way for my easy waltz to the ballot booth. Maybe next time you'll take the advice of my wife, who says, "None of this early voting, absentee stuff. Just go to the polling place on Nov. 4 and get your historic election day experience!"

Caption: Georgia flag outside the Governor's Mansion. Copyright Trevor Williams 2008.

The Voter Registration Test

2008-10-30T23:15:00.006-04:00

I'm glad I went to eat Mexican food tonight. Otherwise, I might've gone to vote next Tuesday without some vital items of information. Here are a few things I learned from the diners speaking loudly at the table next to us:

-Barack Obama's campaign is predicated on a lie. While Obama started his campaign calling himself black, new information found on the Internet (that always-infallible source) reveals that he's actually half white, 4 percent black and 46 percent "Arabic." And according to Chelsea Lately, a late-night satirical talk show host, Barack really wasn't raised by his mother, stepfather and then white grandparents. His Kenyan dad was around all the time.

-John McCain is going to immediately overturn Roe v. Wade when he comes into office because he's "against a woman's right to choose."

-We're all going to get drafted into the army to fight unjust wars.

-Why are we giving millions of dollars in aid to countries that don't have food? Why don't we give that rice to the people living under the bridge? And what about me? I only got $11 in my pocket and I gotta spend $5 of it on food tonight.

This conversation embodies all that's wrong with our democracy, where people are flush with information but have no desire to actually find out the truth. In this environment, people can find "facts" to justify any point of view without considering their source. The mainstream media is bad enough, but at least it has to show some discernment. When people start seriously citing late-night shows and obscure conspiracy Web sites in political conversations, it's time to fear the fact that these same folks have just as much say in choosing our leaders as we do.

Take the above quotations. I'm not a big Barack Obama fan, but I think we can at least give him the courtesy of getting his ethnicity right. Yes, his middle name is Hussein and he did spend time in Indonesia. But there's no doubt that his dad was black, whether his dad was from North Africa or West Africa. And how do you become 46 percent of an ethnicity anyway?

As far as his dad goes, I'm pretty sure Barack only saw him once after returning to the U.S. from Indonesia.

The abortion quote illustrates how a tidbit of truth can sometimes be twisted. Yes, McCain says he is staunchly pro-life, but he doesn't have the power himself to single-handedly overturn Roe v. Wade. The president does not interpret the law. Hopefully our friends at the adjacent table were referring the fact that the president will probably appoint tons of judges to lower federal courts and possibly the Supreme Court over his first term. While Obama has said his appointees would have to feel empathy for the little man, McCain says he's going to appoint folks based on credentials, not ideology. See this article for more...

President Bush recently announced troop reductions in Iraq. Certainly this is a better time to start drafting people than when we made the troop surge last year.

Oh, and the last quote. Why do we give aid to other countries? I guess we should hand over millions to people who have not taken advantage of the opportunity our country - the most prosperous on earth - has given them. Maybe we should hoard our affluence, keeping it within our borders and leaving millions of innocent victims of natural disasters to fend for themselves. See cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China.

I encountered these folks a week after listening to this Howard Stern segment where Obama backers voice their support for policies that are actually John McCain's and even agree that Sarah Palin will make a good pick as Obama's VP.

All this combined makes me wonder whether or not we should have a voter registration test, a quick quiz on the basics of the candidates' positions before being allowed to cast a ballot. I mean, that's the assumption behind having a voting age, right? That once we're 18, we have the ability to discern.

That skill was not evident around the dinner table tonight.

Key to the Battle

2008-10-18T20:49:00.004-04:00

I've been lucky enough never to have to experience war firsthand. Because others sacrificed their lives, I've had the privilege of living in peace. And because our country remains prosperous and vigilant, I've never been called upon to carry the burden of freedom's defense.

But I was ready to enlist today, as the television confronted me with the precious gift that I've received from the brave soldiers who have protected the U.S. throughout our history. Ironically, I turned on the TV to watch football and waste my Saturday away like only spoiled Americans can do. While flipping channels, I came upon a Pearl Harbor documentary and couldn't take my eyes away.

After that was over, a Band of Brothers marathon kept me glued to my couch, its velvet upholstery making me feel like a pansy as the airborne infantry dropped into Normandy to take care of business. I stayed there for the next four hours, switching from football to battlefields with listless clicks of the remote.

I thought about how football - and other sports - are like harmless, silly little parodies of war in a nation so blessed with peace. Strong men fight it out on the battlefield while civilians watch and wave banners, hoping desperately for victory.

This is both sad and wonderful for our generation. It's sad that we're so starved of purpose that we've created and invested so much in these metaphoric battles, but it's amazing that our country is blessed enough that we have time and energy to devote to leisure.

Why do we love war stories enough to create games that mimic them? I think it's because as we follow the characters through their crises, we see how the prospect of death reveals the simplicity of life. Soldiers facing their end value things like milkshakes, as one Pearl Harbor survivor said, or a peaceful plot of land, as a Band of Brothers character put it.

We also see how being embroiled in epic conflicts helps soldiers gain a firm sense of purpose in their roles. Each soldier depends on his group, and each mission is critical to the overall war strategy.

Although our lives aren't filled with mortars and hand grenades, the Christian life seems, at least metaphorically, very similar. We are to live with a singular purpose on one mission for our King, carried out with the help of our brothers in arms. We don't always see the fruits of our missions, but we trust our commander that our effort is a worthy part of a grand victory scheme.

In Band of Brothers, one elite paratrooper becomes petrified with fear as soon as he hits the drop zone. When battle starts to rage, he ducks into a hole, screaming and covering his ears while bullets whiz by. Then he remembers the advice of one of his fellow soldiers: We're all scared, but if you consider yourself already dead, you'll have the strength to fight without the influence of fear.

The key that helped the fearful soldier fight is the key to the battle of our lives. When we turned to Jesus, we counted our old selves dead. We need not fear the fight or the scars we may receive in the battle. The war is won and our fates sealed in him. We are wrapped up in his story. If we follow his objectives, we will receive the glory of the kingdom he is building.

Photo: WWII Memorial in Washington. Copyright Trevor Williams 2007.

My interview with Louvre Director Henri Loyrette

2008-10-08T15:29:00.009-04:00

I'm not too artsy, but even I got excited when I was told I'd be able interview the top official from arguably the greatest museum in the world about his interaction with Atlanta's High Museum of Art. See the video below. The article will be posted on GlobalAtlanta's Web site later today.

The Other Side

2008-10-06T21:00:00.005-04:00

Last year I blogged about how interesting it has been for me to watch diplomats at work. I've interviewed about 20 ambassadors in the past year. Their lives are full-throttle, but even on camera, they're always sharp, fresh and ready to answer tough questions from the perspective of their countries.

Last week, I interviewed Brazil's ambassador to the U.S., and he was as poised as I expected. Today, I listened as the French ambassador to the U.S. spoke about France's objectives in its last three months as head of the European Union. Some tough questions about the global financial crisis came from the crowd, but Pierre Vimont handled them in stride, showing an impressive breadth of knowledge.

I think I admire diplomats because I'm unsure I will ever attain their level of professionalism and intelligence, but today was a big stride for me. For a few moments, I shared the stage with Mr. Vimont in front of a luncheon crowd of about 150 people.

With a small cheat sheet in hand to make sure I didn't melt down, I commended Mr. Vimont for his support for Atlanta and presented him with the copy of a special report that GlobalAtlanta recently completed about the partnership between the Louvre and the High Museum of Art. It was a small gesture and probably seemed mundane for the folks in the crowd. For me, it was an affirmation that I could hold my own on the other side of the camera.

Watch the short video below and let me know how I did.

Jesus or Cola?

2008-10-05T22:41:00.006-04:00

As I pulled into the drive-thru at McDonald's today, I thought about whether or not I should buy a soft drink to wash down my other selections from the dollar menu. The conversation in my head went something like this:

A Coke with my double cheeseburger would be awesome, but I've already had a cola today, and if I just get water, I'll get out of here wasting less cash and saving more calories.

I love Coca-Cola, and although I try not to make impulse buys, sometimes I fiend for a swig of the caramel-colored nectar in the late afternoon. Like a cheap addict, I've resorted to collecting Coke caps and cartons from recycling bins and trash cans for the reward points. Eight caps scores a free 20-ounce Coke, which means that I can save $1.50 when my next binge hits.

As I drove up to the window to pick up my water, I thought about how absurd it is that we spend money on cola when restaurants offer water for free. Packed with high fructose corn syrup, acids and food coloring, Coke isn't great for your teeth, and it doesn't do much for your body either. Water, on the other hand is the basic element we need to stay alive. It makes up 70 percent of our bodies and has zero calories.

Compared side by side on these factors, water seems the easy favorite. The spoiler in the equation is that little thing called taste. Although water is a necessity, it's also bland. Coke is sweet. With short-term pleasure as its goal, the part of the brain that thinks about the long-term impact shuts down.

Sometimes Jesus is like water to me. He's the necessity. He's pure. And He's free. You'd think he'd be the easy choice. But I often turn away from him and choose the saccharine substitutes the world offers, even digging through the trash of sin to finance a fix when there's a faucet pouring with life just inside my front door.

Photo: Old World of Coke building at Underground Atlanta. Copyright Trevor Williams 2004.